This week Martha and Stepan made a connection to each other because they’re reading the same book and then made this beautiful connection to another text via Chapter 3 of Daniel Levitin’s book The Organized Mind

Do you ever have a piece of music come to mind when you’re reading?  As an English teacher and as a teacher-librarian, I often help my students engage with those voices in their heads that are making connections….and to trust that those voices are helping them read better and to reflect on their meaning.  If we redefine text to mean anything that has been expressed for communication, then the world opens up to possibility for connecting our reading to other texts.

Vikram Chandra’s book Geek Sublime reminded me of my lifelong goal to smoke a hooka because his book’s organization logic is completely tangential.  Luckily my brain works in the same way so I really enjoyed going down the rabbit hole with Chandra.  His own work in writing science fiction reminded him of his daily job in computers as a programmer which reminded him of how difficult it was to learn Sanskrit which reminded him of the marginalized voices of ancient Sanskrit female poets and how these voices are being lost to time as the parchment they are written on is disintegrating.  My favourite thing about reading popular non-fiction is that I often need to just pause and let those connections be made in my own mind.

I made another connection for #BIT15Reads as I had my quarterly meeting with the Ontario School Library Association Council and told them how thrilled I was that so many people had engaged with our online book club.  To date we have 66 members in the Goodreads club and many more following our hashtag.  The OSLA Council then asked me to make the connection to a very cool event called Treasure Mountain Canada  and I plan to talk about the evolution of #BIT15Reads.

Speaking of connections #BIT15Reads will continue to:

• meet in a Google hangout once a week on Sundays at 7:30pm ET
• rate our reading as it happens at http://goo.gl/forms/DraziODtiX
• tweet using the hashtag #BIT15Reads
• add to my flipboard for #BIT15Reads View my Flipboard Magazine.

If you want to try something else in a different media type or at a different time, go for it!  Please invite me!  I’m just having fun and enjoying this new community so much.  It’s for all of us so make it suit you best.