October is here, and that means it is (almost) time for the 2026 Ghoulishly Bookish Readathon!

For those of you who are new here, Ghoulishly Bookish is our fall readathon, taking place from October 17th through October 31st! It’s a team-based productivity readathon–instead of trying to read a certain number of books, or books that fit a certain prompt, you hear points (candy) per 100 pages read, and the team that collects the most candy by midnight on Halloween wins! 

The hope of this challenge is that it’ll be fun, community-building, and low-stakes. If you usually can’t participate in readathons because you’re a slower reader who doesn’t finish more than a book or two a month, you only have to read 8 pages per day to earn a candy to help your team. If you’re too much of a mood reader for prompt-based reading challenges, you can read anything you want for this one–including graphic novels or comics.

For my audiobook readers, those will obviously count as well, just convert your listening into pages. If you use Storygraph, it does it automatically (just look at your journal), but you can also engage in some light math–say you read 20% of a 500 page novel… that’s 100 pages! Or you can wait to log your pages until you finish a book (page counts are easily available on Storygraph, Goodreads, or Amazon).

The readathon itself will take place on Discord–you can access our community server by subscribing to any tier and clicking the widget at the bottom of this post (or in your welcome email!) or clicking here.

Choose Your Fighter

The Ghoulishly Bookish Readathon consists of two teams:

Team Vampire

Team Witch

You can head over to #choose-your-team in the Discord server to pick which team you want to be a part of! You can select whichever team you prefer, and I will weight the candy earned to make it fair, but it is easier on me when you keep the teams even–and I think it makes it more fun when it’s closer to a 1-to-1 ratio on each team. 

Earning + Logging Candy

As I said before, you earn one candy for every 100 pages read! When you’ve read 100 pages (or whenever you’re ready to log your multiple hundreds of pages at once) pop over to #candy-log and comment your team’s candy into the channel equal to the 100s of pages you’ve read since you last logged candy.

Team Vampire’s candy is

Team Witch's candy is

You can log as you go, at the end of each day, not until the very end of the readathon–it’s up to you! I’ll be doing updated throughout the readathon of where the counts are at, but as long as your candy is logged by noon, pacific time on November 1st (though the pages must have been read on Oct 31st or before) it will be counted for the final score! 

I had so much fun with this readathon last year and I’m ecstatic to bring it back! I hope you’ll join us! :)