my decision to participate in wikathon has four major motivations: * to read more works by filipino authors * to introduce myself to more filipino authors outside of my usual sphere * to make some friends * to get the ugly taste that my last readathon left in my mouth the competitive spirit of the olympic games readathon made it highly motivating to read. however, an amalgamation of disappointing reads, a time crunch, and a strict TBR made the experience suboptimal for me. i was 99% sure i was never going to participate in another readathon again... until i heard about the wikathon. while my TBR has always been diverse, this year i realised that there was a severe lack of people from my background in the books i was reading. i had started watching the good place (a discussion for another time) and it made me so emotional to see a filipino person playing a filipino character on mainstream western television. up until then, i had only seen filipinos as latinx characters, or latinx as filipino characters, or worse, jake zyrus on glee (a two-second cameo and crushed hopes).
then i discovered patron saints of nothing by randy ribay, which changed my life. i have tried time and time again to get all my thoughts and feelings about this book into words and sentences, but unfortunately i cannot get my sh*t together enough to tell you how much this book means to me. if i were given the opportunity to meet randy ribay, i'm not sure i could keep it together long enough to thank him for his book. while the experience i had reading this book gave me so many amazing things, one of the best things that happened was the introduction to filipino-authored literature. my hope in participating in wikathon to have this experience over again! for the best sources on information about wikathon, i highly recommend you check out their twitter account, and also watch kate's video introducing the readathon. if you'd like a quick gist before following those links, the wikathon is a readathon featuring filipino authors and their works. the challenge is to read books by filipino authors for the whole month of august while the philippines celebrates their linguistic diversity (buwan ng wika). the readathon is pretty loose in that sense, which is why i'm excited to participate. sticking to a strict TBR previously made me a little anxious, so the freedom in being able to read any book by a filipino author is a relief to me. that being said, there are optional challenges, which i believe are meant to help guide people in building TBRs if they don't have one already. i decided to be a little optimistic and build a somewhat strict TBR using these prompts! note: i won't be giving synopses because i actually don't know what these books are really about outside of the superficial description (for matching to challenges), nor do i want to. i like going in knowing almost absolutely nothing like a psychopath. here's what i hope to be reading for wikathon's challenges:
other books that i hope to read during this month include:
ambitious, i know, and it is a little nerve-wracking. but as nerve-wracking as it is, i'm so excited to dive into some of these books! if you're looking for more books for these challenges or are just interested in reading more books by filipino authors, i highly suggest joining the wikathon discord server because there are a lot of awesome people giving recommendations for completing this challenges, and, who knows, you might find a new favourite. (this turned out a lot longer than i intended) i don't know if i'm going to do any updates here, but feel free to follow me on twitter and instagram, where i'm sure the screaming will continue once the readathon starts. thanks for reading this far if you have, and i hope you read some good stuff for the wikathon!!
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hi, i'm mari, and i'm a STEM grad student, i watch baseball, and i read... a lot of books. i hope you learn some-thing new while you're here!
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