Owls Readathon

This is it! The year I'm going to finally participate in Owls rather than watching others have fun with it. For the past two years I've looked on as others participate in this readathon but no more! Honestly, the main reason I've never participated before was that it all seemed too confusing. I would see people say they were reading a book for Defence Against the Dark Arts and have no idea what they were talking about. Were they reading Gadding with Ghouls? Maybe Wanderings with Werewolves? Alas no! The point of OWLs or Ordinary Wizarding Levels is to read a book based on a prompt related to a Hogwarts subject. For example, if the prompt for Herbology was to read a book focusing on a man-eating succulent we would... struggle immensely to find one. But don't worry! The prompts are far easier than that. I'll link to all the info you'll need to take part in the readathon for yourself at the bottom, but for now, I want to share with you what career path I'm choosing, along with what books I'm planning to read for each OWL.



So drum roll please. The career path I will be choosing is... SEER! I was torn between Seer and Magizoologist for a long time. I love magical creatures and would love to be the next New Scamander, but the prompts for Seer seemed a little easier and I wanted to use books that were already on my shelves rather than having to buy new ones. Besides I've been told I look like Trelawney far too many times. 

So onto the OWLs themselves! The Seer career requires three OWL's, which are Ancient Runes, Astronomy and Divination. Along with careers, there are extra training or seminars you can do, which require more OWL's. I was going to ignore this and just stick to my career, but then I saw it... ANIMAGUS TRAINING! Wouldn't it be amazing to just turn into an animal at will and throw away all your responsibilities? Of course, you could end up turning into a beetle and be trapped in a glass jar forever but I digress. The point is being an animagus has the potential to be awesome. However the fact is becoming an Animagus requires time and dedication. It doesn't just happen overnight! By doing this training I would be doubling the books I had to read from three to six, so my plan is to do my OWLs for my career first, and then if I have extra time I'll do the OWLs I need for the Animagus Training too. So with that I present you... my TBR! 

 So these are the books I've decided on for my Seer OWLS! I'll go through each one individually and explain my choices for each prompt because why not?

Ancient Runes- Heart Rune- Heart on the cover or in the title.

So turns out I have a lot of books with hearts on the cover or in the title as I had so many choices for this one! I decided to go with Heartstream by Tom Pollock. I read White Rabbit, Red Wolf a while back and although I found it confusing I found it really interesting! This one seems to be similar to Black Mirror so I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Astronomy-  Night classes: read majority of this book when it's dark outside 

So as I have a blog tour coming up this month, I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone (or snakes in this case) and make the book I'm going to be reviewing part of my OWLs. Also I'm a Slytherin so the book cover is actually quite relatable to the readathon. I'm honestly pretty nocturnal with being in lockdown due to the Coronavirus so I don't think reading when it's dark is going to be too much of a problem for me! 


Divination- Third Eye: assign numbers to your TBR pile and use a random number generator to pick your read

This one was so fun to do! My TBR is huge so I couldn't add everything, but I assigned a number to 20 books and this is the one that came out! This is a fairly new book as it only came out last month and it's written in verse which has already grabbed my attention! I don't think I've ever read a novel in verse before so I think this will be an interesting read!


So there we go! That's my TBR so I can have a career telling the future... Honestly I just want to get into the department of mysteries and this might be a stepping stone towards that... if what I see in my future is accurate. Anyway what's the point in being a Seer if you can't turn into a cat right? Here's where I've tried to challenge myself by adding an extra three books which I may or may not get round to. The OWL's required for Animagus Training are Arithmancy, Potions and Transfiguration so let's get on to that!


Arithmancy- Magical qualities of number 2 balance/opposites- read something outside your favourite genre

I'm sure I've mentioned this hundreds of times before but my favourite genre is fantasy! Therefore I've chosen The Boy at the Back of the Class, a Middle Grade book about a refugee boy who has escaped his war-torn country and finds himself in a brand new environment in a brand new school where he knows nobody. This seems like a sad but heartwarming story about acceptance and I'm all for that! 

Potions- Shrinking Solution: book under 150 pages

I struggled a little with this one. Turns out I don't have all that many short books! I did however find this on my shelves, which is a short story about Magnus and Alec from the Shadowhunters books going on their first date. Honestly this just seems like pure fluff and as I'm complete trash for Malec I'm sure I'll enjoy this one! 

Transfiguration- Animagus lecture: book/series that contains shapeshifting

This is the one I struggled with the most! I couldn't for the life of me find a book on my shelves with shapeshifting, and thought I'd have to actually buy a new book for this prompt. However, I found this book adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, and of course, most of the characters in Beauty and the Beast are various household items that used to be people... It sounds so weird when you describe it like that. This book seems to be an adaptation of the movie, and as Beauty and the Beast is probably one of my favourite Disney movies, I'm sure I'll enjoy reading this despite knowing what's going to happen

So there we go! I'm going to try to get through all of these books, but I'm really not going to beat myself up if I don't manage to become an Animagus. As I'm very new to all this I'll probably be struggling over on twitter, so feel free to chat to me there about how OWLs is going for you! If like me you're completely new, I'll link to a few things to help you get started. OWLs start today, so make sure you have parchment, a quill and ink, and remember that Dumbledore is checking to make sure no Auto-Answer quills are brought into exams!

G's announcement vid: (all links are under her vid!) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRuZ4EBkiKA&

Magical Readathon twitter: https://twitter.com/MagicalReadthn