Reader...I read it in one sitting...

[gt3]

Has anyone actually done this? I've just started reading a non-fiction book where on the jacket is says something along the lines of "it was fabulous...I read it in one go..." This book runs to 313 pages not including the index. It's a "standard" paperback size with about 350 words per page. I'm finding it absolutely enthralling. But it's dense and full of detail and deserves careful reading. Unless that person spent an entire day doing nothing else except making the occasional cup of tea and taking comfort breaks as required, I find it difficult to believe they did actually read it in one go.

I've only managed it once, reading The Road. I started it in the departure lounge at Madrid and finished it just as we touched down in London - and even then it was a close thing as to whether I'd finish it before the person next to me wanted to get off the plane. And I'm not a slow reader. It's an integral part of my job, reading. I know "how" to read so to speak. The only reason I was able to finish it was because I was free of outside distraction and was a prisoner of my environment.

So, anyway, any other examples of people reading books in one go?

[Sporting]

Many, many times in the past, but not for a long time, as my attention span seems to be getting shorter with age.

[ursus arctos]

Very much the same here.

For some reason, I particularly recall reading the Tolkien trilogy for the first time over a weekend when I was 12.

As I increasingly find myself with multiple books on the go at once now, the equivalent has become reading one entire without picking one of the others up (most recently Mary Beard's S.P.Q.R.)

[WOM]

Never could and probably never will. I read voraciously and slowly. Probably the fastest I've gone through a book is Bad Blood this past March. I mean, it was compelling and easy to read, so I motored through. But that was about a full day and half of the next, sitting around a pool and doing not much else. But normally I'm a book a week on the train and before bed. I don't carve out 'reading time' or anything.

[Patrick Thistle]

I read 'A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' on a transatlantic plane flight once. Obviously I took bathroom breaks.

I'm pretty sure I read '2001: A Space Odyssey' in one go on a long car journey as a kid.

[Guy Profumo]

Noddy goes to Toytown?

[Amor de Cosmos]

Quite a number I reckon. For example I've read a lot of Wodehouse books on long-haul flights.

[hobbes]

Who are these people who can read in cars without blowing chunks?

[Lang Spoon]

Never been a problem for me.

[Sam]

Yeah I never got carsick as a child, unless I read so much as a magazine or newspaper sidebar, and then I'd be heaving within minutes.

As for the OP, I did it with Chronicle of a Death Foretold and with Animal Farm. Neither are long, and the former was helped by the fact I picked it up one morning as my mum and I were leaving for a hospital appointment which turned out to involve a bit more waiting around than expected.

I am slightly in awe of ursus' claim to have read LOTR (as I assume he means by 'the Tolkein trilogy') in a single weekend. It took me about ten months at a similar age, albeit not helped by the fact I didn't especially like it, in hindsight.

[Gangster Octopus]

I once got a William Kotzwinkle book out of the library, and I'd finished it before I'd got home on the bus. Admittedly it was Swimmer in the Secret Sea, but even so...

[Furtho]

JL Carr's brilliant A Month In The Country, but then it is something like 110 pages.

[Sits]

I may have done this when I was a lot younger, but I doubt it. Now the attention span's shot.

I am another one who gets terrible car sickness if I read even for ten seconds.

[andrew7610]

I can get through about 3 books a week on my commute (2 hours each way, 4 days a week) but haven't done anything straight through in a while - probably The Old Man and the Sea which is pretty short and lends itself to that.

Whenever a new Harry Potter volume came out, my daughter would re-read the existing ones in order, one each day, before picking up the latest one.