Serial Readers blog

Dear friends and readers,

My Facebook Scrabble buddy Susan* has recently told me about her serial readers blog. I haven't really gotten involved yet, but it seems as though maybe it started with Dickens novels that were originally written as serials anyway, and so Susan is reading them in the chunks that they were originally serialized in (Susan, if you're reading this, correct me if I'm wrong!?) - and so you join her by reading the weekly chunks which are very doable chunks (chunks - isn't that a nice, literary, mellifluous, multisyllabic word?) and then Susan blogs about the installment and you can put your own comments about it on her blog too - so it's a virtual reading group and it's weekly and ongoing. I thought it was a very cool idea and wanted to tell you my trusty friends, some of whom are in places like Hamburg or Albany (Kensington?) or who knows where else stuck without a reading group to call your own, or maybe you live in Austin and you do have a book group but you and your teenage daughter are big readers anyway and this could be another cool thing if life wasn't already so busting out of its seams . . . or you live in Bloomington, Indiana, the hub of the ladies-who-book-group universe, but you're just desperate for another connection, one more place, where you can read books and discuss them . . . . 

Here's the link. And below it, more links.

http://www.serialreaders-dickens.blogspot.com/

Aha, here you are, below that link, and I promised more links, but they do not look like the link above, they are verbal and conceptual links not virtual ones, because in the ever-closing loop that is life and friendships and connections, Susan my glorious Facebook Scrabble buddy* comes to me thanks to Elenabella my real-world friend and Susan's old friend, and Elenabella my real-world friend (and my link and entree to a very rich and wonderful and lifesaving group of women in Bloomington way back in the dark days of 2000) is also my mentress, muse, and inspiration for finally starting this blog because she started her own while I was dithering and on-the-fencing and OK, there is another actual virtual (oooh!) link coming, and here it is in a minute, but after that there are some more, or at least one more, verbal and conceptual link(s) if you stick with me. First, elenabella:

elenabella.blogspot.com/

There, and now the conceptual and virtual link: Ellen saved my happiness and enriched my life permanently and changed my paradigm, I truly believe, inviting me in to the weekly women's group when I moved to Bloomington in 2000 where Rebecca, Jane, Catherine, Deb, Sarah, Suzanna, Sharon, Ellen, and I met every week to talk about ourselves and our friends and our stories and God. In the 7 years in which we met every week, some got divorced, some got married, some completely changed the structure of their lives, some changed their important religious affiliations, some lost 80 pounds, some fought, (and since we stopped meeting some are having a first baby and some are having a first wedding and surely they could never have done all that without having spent the 7 years with us, right?) ... Now I really can barely live without weekly groups, and women's groups, and preferably combinations. But all of that still wasn't really a new link, was it? The new link was going to be this: Ellen and I closed that circle a little when I got her into my (nonvirtual) book group I was in (odds of getting into that particular book group are often estimated at worse than the odds of getting into Swarthmore; I myself had squeezed in with great difficulty), where we both continue to happily reside. As do several other readers of this blog!

* Re Facebook Scrabble buddy Susan and me: at this point I almost certainly have more individual countable interactions daily with Susan than with anyone else in the world, since we are playing six to eight different Scrabble games together at a time [each one takes a week or two to finish, I think, since we play one to four or five moves each per day per game].