Monday Madness 8-29-2016

Monday Madness!

August 29th 2016

I have completed The Night Sister by: Jennifer McMahon as you all will know; and have not picked up another book since. I know this is not a great track record for myself as I usually have a book on the go at all times, however I was saving this chunker for a special time. That time is the next sixteen days, and the novel that I will be delving into is......

Jerusalem: 

by: Alan Moore

Page Count: 1279

• This book is going to take time and effort to complete, however I am happy to dive in and see where Moore takes this tome! This book is a highly anticipated read of mine for the fall of this year, and I was kindly sent it for review by Liveright Publishing house.

Plot: In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap tower blocks. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-coloured puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent spectres of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlours labourers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.

Disappeared lanes yield their own voices, built from lost words and forgotten dialect, to speak their broken legends and recount their startling genealogies, family histories of shame and madness and the marvellous. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church-front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath towards the heat death of the universe.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city. Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, this is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter. (Goodreads.com)

My First impressions: 

In reading only the first page of this tome, I can tell that it is going to be weird all around, with its promise of travel and ghosts. Moore's writing style will take a period of adjustment for me as he writes beautiful and layered sentences that must be consumed at a slower rate than I am accustomed to. I do think that I am going to enjoy this novel, even with the weird and far fetched plots and many characters; as long as I am able to keep the characters sorted in my mind I should have fun reading this one!

I will update you all when I have begun this tome! If you would like to get up to the minute updates and my thoughts while reading this novel, follow me on Goodreads at: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/17748842-wil

Aside: I have found a miraculously fast way to upload videos while here at university so I will be able to put up videos on my Sunday deadlines and get more content to you all in general which is very exciting! I just posted this video last night when I arrived, showcasing all the books that I brought to university with me!

Books At Uni With me, Fall 2016