New List Today AND a question at the bottom:

Once again, welcome to the seventh tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade--a book club from the comfort of your own living room. Grab a cup of coffee and start clicking away at the links below.

Just to explain, this book club is entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way.

Book: Happiness Sold Separately
Author: Lolly Winston
Start Date: September 19
Post Dates: October 29th and 30th
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours.)

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (click on any of the links below to take you to a stop on this book tour. Jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on Happiness Sold Separately).

Group B:

That Was The Plan (Ms. Planner)
A Little Sweetness (Meghan)
All Things Deb (Deb)
Waiting for...? (Amy)
Road Blocks and Rollercoasters (R&R)
Where is My Happiness? (Bean)
The Open Door (Deanna)
Fatty Pants (Fattypants)
Outlandish Notions (Sharah)
The Infertile Long and Winding Road (Ms. Infertile)
No Swimmers in the Tubes... (Noswimmers)
Fertilize Me (Farah)
Baby Steps to Baby Shoes (Baby Steps)
Desperate to Multiply (Portia P)

Even if you haven't read Happiness Sold Separately, you can still add your own thoughts on the blog tour or react to someone else's critique.

Like the idea of being in a book club without leaving your living room? The next book for book tour #8 is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Even if you read this book a long time ago, I promise reading it again with a book club will make you see it in an entirely new light.

The Details: Tour #8 will start October 31st (spooky!). Participants will read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. On Tuesday, December 6th everyone will send one question based on the book (to get a sense of questions, click here to see the questions sent for book tour #2) to thetowncriers@gmail.com. I will compile the questions into lists that will be emailed out to you on December 7th. Everyone will choose 3 questions from the list and answer them on their own blog on December 10th--12th (we will break up into two or three smaller groups and you can choose which day works best for you when the date gets closer). Each day of the tour, I'll also post a master list and people can jump from blog to blog, reading and commenting on the book tour.

If you would like to sign up to participate in book tour #8, leave a comment below or send me an email at thetowncriers@gmail.com. I need the title and a link to your blog as well as an email address where you'd like the two or three book club emails sent. If a spouse wants to participate too and he/she doesn't have their own blog, have them set up a blog solely for book tours (as we did with the Annex) and send me a link to that blog. And if you're a reader without a blog, now is a great time to set up a space for yourself on Blogger. People will be able to find brand-spanking-new blogs because they will be on the book tour's participant list. Want to participate but live overseas and want to order many books at once in order to save on shipping? The next few tours are always listed on my side bar under the book icon and we'll be voting soon on the book tours for the winter. Happy reading.

NEW BOOK CLUB IDEA:

You know the idea of spinning plates? I've been mulling over the idea of spinning books. As I'm putting together the voting list for the next tours, I'm thinking of all these great books that are the opposite of an IF/pg loss book. The ones that give you an escape from everything that is going on. And beyond that, I actually do read books that are not infertility-related (gasp!). Jasper Fforde, chicklit, random Booksense bestsellers. I want to read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, but I don't want to read it in a vacuum. And I love you guys. And the Barren Bitches Book Brigade rocks. What do you think of a spinning book group? Each tour would become eight weeks long, but the two books would spin at the same time. You could drop in for either one or both. So every four weeks (as opposed to every six weeks), there would be a new tour and it would switch off whether it was an angel (non-IF book) or devil (IF-book) tour. If it gets too crowded, I'll start a spin-off site where we can discuss/run both tours. Yes? No? Maybe so?