The Department of English Presents

The 13th Annual Marathon Reading

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Recent News

Marathon Reading Date Change: Now May 9th to 10th

UCLA's Marathon Reading will now take place from May 9th to May 10th! As the event is no longer taking place over Mother's Day weekend, there is so much more time to brush up on your reading (or binging on Hulu!) of The Handmaid's Tale and the Parable series. Books...

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Coming soon! The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale, is publishing a sequel to the widely popular novel. Her new book, titled The Testaments, will discuss the world 15 years after The Handmaid's Tale left off. Her new book will deviate from the previous novel in that it...

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Earthseed: A new religion!

Octavia Butler's Parable series features a religion, Earthseed, created by the protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina. In both Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Lauren journals about Earthseed, a religion founded on principles of change. These tenets resonated...

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Featured Author: Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 and published her most popular novel, The Handmaid's Tale, in 1985, which inspired the creation of an original Hulu series. Atwood has a wide range of interests; she has published works of poetry, short fiction,...

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About the Marathon

Free and open to the public, the UCLA English Department Marathon Reading is an annual event that brings together the campus and the wider Los Angeles community to celebrate great works of literature spoken aloud.

Hundreds of volunteers take turns, relay-style, to recite an entire novel in a 24-hour stretch, creating the experience of a live, crowdsourced audiobook. The audience is free to join or leave at any point in the performance. We will have food trucks, a used book sale, and other booths and activities (TBA!).

This year we will work our way through three important texts: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Join us on May 9-10, 2019, from 12 p.m.-12 p.m., in the Powell Library Courtyard on UCLA’s beautiful campus.

Any donations made in honor of the event go to support summer research fellowships for students in the UCLA English Department. In our current environment of decreased funding for education in the humanities fields, please consider supporting the Marathon Reading!

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