 Alrighty. Here we go. Hello, hello, everyone. Welcome to the Kickoff Reading Sprints for the Continu-a-thon. I'm Laura from Laura's Little Library. Unfortunately, Hugo and Jane both have some things going on, so they're not actually able to make it right now. But you know what? That is A-okay, so we're just going to go ahead and start the sprints with just us. So if you haven't heard of the Continu-a-thon, it is a read-a-thon happening from April 2 to 15, and we are focusing on finishing and continuing series, duologies, trilogies, even companion novels. So yeah. So I'm going to start off with these reading sprints by Reading the Toll by Neal Schusterman. This is the final book in the Ark of the Scythe trilogy, and I've been putting off reading this because I really love the first and second book, and I didn't want the world to end. I didn't want to stop reading the characters, so I stopped and didn't read the third one. But now I'm finally going to pick it up, and I'm finally going to finish the story, and I am super excited for it. It's also super intimidating because it's a bit of a brick. It's a little bit of a chunky one, so that's why I'm forcing myself to read it now with the sprints, because otherwise I will probably never start this. So what are you guys reading or doing if you're going to do other things? Yes, I have found it to be really good. I don't read a lot of sci-fi, but I very much enjoyed this. I used to read a lot of dystopian when I was younger, and so this kind of fits the vibe while being something new and interesting. Tales from the Shadow Hunter Academy? Oh, that's awesome. I have not been keeping up with Cassandra Clare at all, but I should at some point because I did very much enjoy the original series, The City of Bones. That's really cool. Let me know how you like it, because isn't it more of a companion to the series or is it still like an actual novel? Frankenstein? Nice. Yeah, I really need to reread that one. I don't remember a majority of what happened, because I tried to read it in a day to finish it in the last of a readathon, so that's awesome. I hope it's as good as the first time you read it. Also, completely realized that I'm wearing the wrong glasses. Best I will not be able to see the book. That's very fun. Alrighty. Well, I think we should probably get started with actually reading these books. I'm probably going to get started with a 30-minute sprint just to kind of get started, get into the books, but if you want to do like a longer or shorter sprint, just let me know and we can do that next time. So let me just quick get that set up. Getting it all set up. Happy reading, everybody. Okay. Am I back? Are we back? This was crazy. I think it may have been the timer that did it. Okay. So yeah. So basically, Chrome decided to stop responding for a hot minute there. I think it may have been a little too much on my computer, but we still got eight and a half minutes left of the reading sprint. So I'm just going to shut up. I won't share the timer screen again because I don't want this to happen again, but I will let you know when the timer is done. So continue reading. Have fun. Alrighty. That was 30 minutes of a sprint with one little interruption. But yeah, how did everybody do with their reading? I got to chapter two. I got to page 32, which is pretty good. Yeah, I'm liking it so far. I've definitely forgotten quite a few of the smaller details. I remember the big main idea of the last book, but I'm slowly remembering smaller details, but I'm liking it so far. So yeah. Yeah. And we had a question about one of the, about the prompts. So I'm just going to like vocalize it so that everybody can know the answer if they had the same question. So for the start and finish a series entirely prompt, that is meant to be like one of the harder, like kind of more bonus prompts. So that would be starting a series. So four or more books in line with each other. Starting and finishing it within these two weeks, rather than like a duology or a trilogy, just because there are prompts for those already. But you know, it's for some people, it's a lot easier to do duologies within two weeks. So I wanted there to be a little bit more of a challenging prompt to keep a little interesting. But yes, my computer's decided to freeze, but that's okay. Yeah, translated fiction can be interesting just with what languages fiction is translated into and what ones it isn't. So if it's not your native language, that can be really difficult. But I commend you for doing that. I have not read too many books in other languages that I somewhat speak. But I really should. I need to do more of that. Nice, nice. So how are we feeling in terms of doing more reading sprints? Do we want to do like longer ones, shorter ones, another 30 minute one? Yeah, I was thinking about maybe bumping it up to a 45 minute one, because now that I've like gotten started, I really want to just sit and get immersed into it. But you know, if other people want to do like shorter ones, that's totally fine too. I don't know if I'll be able to do the timer on the screen again, just because I don't want to lose the connection. But 45 minute one. Is that good? Go ahead and set the timer. Honestly, I might just do, I'm going to actually end up doing a timer on my phone, because my computer does not want to load. I'm just trying to butt me out again. Okay. Well, it seems like it's still streaming, even if my computer says it isn't. So I'm just going to go ahead and start the 45 minute sprint now, and hopefully we can make some more good progress. We love technical difficulties. They make life so easy.