THIS BOOK IS THE LONGEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN AND THEN PUBLISHED: It's Over 13,955 Words, That's The Previous Record I’ve Researched In April '19, ... This Subtitle Is Part Of It, And It's Paperback – 9 April 2020

I was sent a copy for review of This Book is the Longest Sentence ever Written and then Published by Dave Cowan. How do you read a book that has no full stops, no chapters and no ending? Well I found out that you just dive in and see where you end up.This book is basically one long run on sentence beginning with the title but not ending at the end. There are no full stops, no question marks and no exclamation points but there is a lot of thought and soul.The book for me was a continuous stream of consciousness that Dave uses to work through the death of his father, the realities of their shared bipolar disorder but also how he sees his life as a son, a man, a writer and a person who is dealing with his mental health.The story is a loving tribute to his late father as he painstakingly processes the life his father lead, how he dealt with his mental health, physical health and how he never let it interfere with how much affection and love he showed to others.I found this book helpful personally as someone who has lost a good friend to mental health issues. I felt Dave’s raw, honest and sometimes heartbreaking musings on his life, religion, his relationship with his father and his subsequent death and both their individual mental breakdowns showed me inside a mind that dealt with a life that was sometimes beyond their control and gave me more of an understand into my own friend’s thinking and world view.I give the book 🌟🌟🌟🌟. It was a hard read both emotionally and practically. Emotionally I feel like I went on this personal journey with Dave and understood him a lot more by the end. The lack of full stops, paragraphs and chapters made the reading experience a little confusing and frustrating at times and I also felt that a lot of the referenced texts were repetitive and unnecessary space filler. This book took a lot more work to read than any other book I’ve read before but a lot of the time it felt worth that effort.

Full disclosure: This book is one really long and jam-packed sentence. in 300+ pages, you won't encounter any periods paragraph breaks or indentations, but patience will reward you with a bold meditation on writing, publishing, capitalism, Kanye, Jeff Bezos, enneagrams and much more. As a fan of memoir, I most engaged with the author's personal stories about living with bipolar disorder, the death of his father and his father’s reverence for Abraham Lincoln, and the other utterly human and heart-wrenching forays, such as when he recounts how his English teacher shamed him into dropping an advanced English class in high school. This book comes with its own Spotify playlist, and, reader-hack, from someone who regrets not doing it -- jot down all the book he mentions, you'll build an amazing and eclectic reading list.