This book is absolutely horrible! Nothing at all happens. Yes, I can appreciate a book that has detail and uses flashbacks, but Virginia Woolf only employs these literary devices in order to be boastful and showy. Her writing is detailed, poetic CRAP. If you ever want a way to fall asleep at night, read this book.

If you have read and liked The Awakening, then you will probably like this. It is a novel that is significant for its time period.

Not having been a fan of Woolf, after giving up on ‘To the Lighthouse’ after 90 pages, I thought it was only fair to give her another go. And, in doing so, I found one of the best books I have ever read. It was strange to see things you have felt so clearly expressed by someone who died before you were born…

from this book: “The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

Cos i only have the audiobook… I keep forgetting to listen to it…

Real life viewed through the smoky eye of God. I love Virginia.

Dense, having a hard time getting into it. Not sure I am going to finish this.

I got bored with it, and had to take it back to the library before I finished it…I will complete it someday though.

Dense and foreboding. Some of the best and most subtle writing about the social and the melancholic that I’ve yet seen. A chronicle of the small things we do to build bulwarks against time, death and despair, and of how sometimes they’re not enough.

Grade: C- Wait for video. Seriously—fine for if you’ve got nothing much else, but it’s not worth a re-reading.

nearly perfect. like riding a carousel but with life and death and time instead of the usual horses.

always throwing parties.

I read this as a precursor to The Hours. I am the type of person who likes to get a little background if I know that it’s there. I really had to work in order to get it read – I found it to be a very difficult read.

Having said that, I also honestly think that it is a really well-written book. I would like to try it again sometime. I think that I would get a lot more out of it on a second read, and it’s really not so long that that would be out of the question. I really wanted to enjoy it, I just found that it was too much work!

One thing that was a real turn-off for me was the flow. There are no breaks, chapter or otherwise. One of Woolf’s great achievements is the way she seamlessly flows from one point of view or perspective to another, switching characters in the middle of a paragraph or thought. It’s amazing, but also hard to follow (at least for the first part of the book, until you get used to it). If you don’t have the patience (and I don’t) to go back and catch what you missed, you will find yourself missing out on a lot (which I know I did).