I love this idea, though I don't think it's necessary to only pick books that were released through serial publication. What's useful about this project to me is that, well, reading is already hard with so many distractions, but having bite-sized episodes through email might help people make progress without the overhead of sitting down with a book and feeling guilty when they can't make progress.

Another idea is to graduate the project into a more cohesive system: one of the emails you could periodically send is the first N pages of a random, untitled book.

Subject: "[Mystery Book] A story about redemption, a wrongfully imprisoned man." —just a byline summary like that.

And at the end of the email, you provide a link they can click that will subscribe to the rest of that book.