Moribund Mondays

Let’s face it, Mondays are literally the worst. Doesn’t matter if you’re a student or a workin gal or guy, there is nothing worse than the feeling of dread we experience as Sunday draws to a close and we wonder what fresh hell awaits us in the coming week.

In the spirit of these cheerful reflections, I decided to invent a book blogging event called Moribund Mondays. Why did I settle on “moribund”? In sooth, I am not sure. I wanted to do an alliterative meme that would capture the agony of Mondays, and the word moribund just popped into my head. I’ll admit, I wasn’t completely sure what moribund even meant until a few moments ago when I Googled it. I had a feeling it wasn’t exactly a positive descriptor, but that was the extent of my knowledge. For those of you who, like me, have long since forgotten the majority of your SAT vocab words, I present MORIBUND (courtesy of Merriam-Webster):

mor·i·bund (adj.):

• being in the state of dying :  approaching death
• being in a state of inactivity or obsolescence

Examples of MORIBUND:

• an actor who is trying to revive his moribund career
• The peace talks are moribund.

Because I am not a completely glass-half-empty type of person, I thought we could use this Moribund Monday to discuss a book we’ve recently read wherein a moribund character manages to overcome his or her moribundity (not a real word, sadly), whether in the literal sense (e.g., a character on his/her death bed who makes a stunning recovery) or more abstractly.

A quintessentially moribund character that immediately comes to my mind is Julian Carax in Carlos Ruin Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I read this summer.

WARNING: THIS IS KIND OF SPOILERY.

The young Carax is full of promise. He is a brilliant novelist and he has secured the love of a beautiful lady. Unfortunately, he is barely out of grade school when everything he holds dear in life is systematically ripped away from him. He loses the will to write, if not to live, and for the next couple decades plummets into a state of deep despair. Physically, he is disfigured and sickly; mentally, he is unhinged. He is pretty much the definition of moribund. But then through a sequence of incredible events, which I will be vague about so as to not completely spoil this book for you, he manages to pull himself out of this sad state and turn his life around. Hooray!

Like Carax, I feel pretty moribund these days when it comes to my writing. I keep saying to myself, WRITE YOUR NOVEL. But I remain inactive, moribund. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take disfigurement and several near-death experiences to snap me out of it, amiright??!

What characters have inspired you with their ability to cease being moribund??