I can hardly believe it, but we're coming up to the end of the book and our last post for our 2021 read of Middlemarch! The last week of December, we're due to have a final discussion and to chat about adaptations of the book - the main two I'm aware of are the 1994 series with Rufus Sewell (available on Amazon Prime) and this modern retelling of the book put together by some college students and posted on Youtube.

The mods were wondering about changing the format up a little, and possibly doing a "live discussion" chat, which is a Reddit feature that promotes a more informal, live discussion rather than conventional forum posts. The benefits of this change would be that we could treat it more like a party and chat in real time with our Middlemarch friends to celebrate the end of the book and the year! The potential downsides would be that depending on timezones, there might not be many people around in the chat at the same time. We probably also wouldn't be able to do our usual pre-written questions, or if we did, it might be hard to follow them in real time, and there might be a lot of scrolling back and forth.

12/31 is also New Year's Eve and a Friday rather than our usual Saturdays, so folks might be busy with New Year celebrations or otherwise not able to participate. I'm due to post that week, and I have some flexibility in my schedule. So my other question is whether 12/31 is the best day for me to post the final discussion, or if I should plan to post it on a different day.

Let us know what you think in the poll and comments, and we're also open to other ideas for how to conduct the end of year discussion/celebration! The poll will be open for 5 days.

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