For me, the importance of reading marathons is its transformation of a typically solitary activity into a group effort. It’s fun to breathe life into the words on a page, to perform its captured moments as you have imagined them, and see how your vision differs from other readers. I think especially at a time when people have begun to read less and less (oops), reading marathons remind us of the joy of storytelling, and the magic of reading as a social act. Even when you read alone, you still participate in a marathon with readers all around the world, reimagining the same words that have come alive for so many
"So we dropped off [reading marathons] . . . for a while. And I always kind of was . . . elbowing people a little bit, especially after four years, like people don't know what it is and haven't done it. So the excitement starts to come back a little bit. And so we did that. And it came back and we did a few, and that was the Tristam Shandy that I had the t-shirt from, I think it was in 2014. And that was really fun because we had this huge snowstorm came in and it was over. I mean, . . . it kind of almost paralyzed the campus. And I remember we had to pick up the t-shirts and Tim Raylor was coming down from the cities. He was really the person who had organized Skyping in an expert from Shandy Hall in England, you know, the place where Laurence Sterne [author of Tristram Shandy] had grown up. So we had all this stuff, and he was bringing a cake down. We didn't know if he was going to make it. I was floundering through these snow drifts to go down to a t-shirt shop in downtown Northfield to make sure that we had the t-shirt. So it just added this really funny kind of thing. And then when we were in Sayles-Hill, it was really sort of beautiful." -Michael Kowalewski
Promotional slide for the February, 2026 marathon reading of The Old Curiosity Shop.
"[W]e zoomed in the great, great, great granddaughter of Dickens, Lucinda Huxley. And so that was kind of a thrill. And she's connected with the Dickens Museum... [S]he had just met like a week or so before with the London program and they were reading all of her twists and they went to ... the Dickens Museum. And so that was a really nice thing that we had, that transatlantic connection."
-Michael Kowalewski
