Book Club – announcing “read-a-LONG” to February book

HRSFANS Book Club meets each month virtually, by Google Hangouts videoconference. (If you are interested in joining us and have not yet signed up to the Google Groups account – please email Kay S., Kevin M., or Rose M.) Our next few meetings are

  • Dec 12, Silent Hall by N.S. Dolkart
  • Jan 16, Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

On an actual browse through an actual book store (or, well, kind of: it’s a mega-bookstore) earlier this fall I found a bunch of new stuff to try reading, including one that struck me very strongly as The Kind of Book I’d Want Help With. Such a book is usually what makes me want to recommend a month’s foray for Book Club, but Alan Moore’s Jerusalem is also 1200+ pages long, and bears some sort of relation to the works of William Blake—neither of which is by any means Book Club’s usual. (So if you like the idea of regularly discussing books with HRSFANS but not the idea of this doorstop, please don’t be turned off.) I was pleasantly surprised that multiple people said, “yeah, sure, I’m game” when I emailed the group to gauge reaction, so now Jerusalem is our scheduled February 2017 book.

It’s Kay’s suggestion that “It might be easier to tackle this huge, dense book in some kind of read-a-long like steps,” and our weblog seems the simplest way to host those steps. So my commitment for the next while is to post about my progress on Jerusalem at least every other week. Anyone who would like to offer their own post, please contact me or comment to a post and I can coordinate putting it up for you. Of course I hope for comments from other readers throughout.

Before we begin, since this has something to do with William Blake’s Jerusalem, a few sources for that:

  • from BlakeArchive (color, but single link per single page)
  • from HathiTrust (black-and-white, but downloadable in .pdf)
  • the HathiTrust file as a .pdf with blank pages removed, Part 1
  • the HathiTrust file as a .pdf with blank pages removed, Part 2

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