Tag Archives: virginia woolf

Top Ten Tuesday | Most Intimidating Books

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Authors, Book Challenges, BookTalk, Meme

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This meme is brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish. Today’s topic is the top ten most intimidating books that we all dread to read for one reason or another. Here is my list of titles:

  1. Ulysses by James Joyce – I will feel like a complete failure/idiot if I cannot get through this book in one sitting. Especially since it is THE most important book in modern literature. EVER. *shudders*
  2. The Waves by Virginia Woolf – Sometimes Woolf can be completely incomprehensible to me. Her writing is like a strange melody with a hidden beat. I have to hunt for the damn thing in all the dense foliage of her prose. ‘The Waves’ completely baffled me and I wound up running to the nearest exit to this weird labyrinth of fiction.
  3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – The sheer size of it puts me off. It lives on the shelf next to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
  4. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – I really don’t know why people call this a great novel. Never really saw it myself. Intimidating when you can’t see what millions of others can.
  5.  Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon – He is so awesome. ‘The Crying of Lot 49‘ changed my taste in books drastically. It was also one of the hardest damn books I’d ever read. What if I don’t get this one?
  6. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand – The books scares me (sheer size), Ayn Rand scares me (have you seen her?) OMIGOD.
  7. 2666 by Roberto Bolano – I have a love/hate relationship with Bolano. I keep expecting the same kind of pleasure I get when I read Borges but get confused when I don’t. Confused and angry. Not quite the same as intimidated, but…
  8. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie – So much controversy around this novel. What if I end up hating it? Will it cost me a well-respected author?
  9. House of Leaves by M.Z. Danielewski – I read this once before. I don’t think I’ll read it again anytime soon. I have never been so scared of words and the things they can unravel both within and without. Danielewski is king. I grovel at his feet.
  10. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King – A mammoth seven book series that I have only briefly dipped into. I don’t know if I can last the distance…

That’s my list of intimidating books guys. How about yours? Are there any above that scare the bejesus out of you? Would you add to the list?

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Ahh Penguin Modern Classics, How I Love Thee! | Celebrating 50 Years of Good Reads, With Good Reads…

07 Saturday Apr 2012

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Authors we love, and some we don’t: 50 of the best writers of modern fiction are showcased in this collection of 50 little books as Penguin Modern Classics celebrates it’s fiftieth birthday. Which one will you choose?

There it is folks, an entire library of modern literary fiction in one compact little box. How convenient! Having read ‘Hell Screen’ by Akutagawa and ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass’ by Virginia Woolf, I have fallen in love with Penguin’s concept of bringing us tidbits of the best of contemporary fiction. I’m a sucker for short stories.

I am currently taking up the challenge to read ALL of the books in the series which won’t take long provided I can find them all. The great thing about this collection is that they contain stories that not only showcase an authors differing styles (as was the case with Virginia Woolf) but they also bring to light some of the lesser-known, but equally as good works too.

If you want to take up the challenge too then you can find more information abotu the books at the Penguin Modern Classics website or you can purchase the entire set at Amazon or Waterstone’s.

For those interested, here’s a list of all the book’s in the series:

RYUNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA Hell Screen

KINGSLEY AMIS Dear Illusion

DONALD BARTHELME Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

SAMUEL BECKETT The Expelled

SAUL BELLOW Him With His Foot in His Mouth

JORGE LUIS BORGES The Widow Ching – Pirate

PAUL BOWLES The Delicate Prey

ITALO CALVINO The Queen’s Necklace

ALBERT CAMUS The Adulterous Woman

TRUMAN CAPOTE Children on Their Birthdays

ANGELA CARTER Bluebeard

RAYMOND CHANDLER Killer in the Rain

EILEEN CHANG Red Rose, White Rose

G. K. CHESTERTON The Strange Crime of John Boulnois

JOSEPH CONRAD Youth

ROBERT COOVER Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady

ISAK DINESEN [KAREN BLIXEN] Babette’s Feast

MARGARET DRABBLE The Gifts of War

HANS FALLADA Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Babylon Revisited

IAN FLEMING The Living Daylights

E. M. FORSTER The Machine Stops

SHIRLEY JACKSON The Tooth

HENRY JAMES The Beast in the Jungle

M. R. JAMES Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book

JAMES JOYCE Two Gallants

FRANZ KAFKA In the Penal Colony

RUDYARD KIPLING ‘They’

D. H. LAWRENCE Odour of Chrysanthemums

PRIMO LEVI The Magic Paint

H. P. LOVECRAFT The Colour Out of Space

MALCOLM LOWRY Lunar Caustic

KATHERINE MANSFIELD Bliss

CARSON MCCULLERS Wunderkind

ROBERT MUSIL Flypaper

VLADIMIR NABOKOV Terra Incognita

R. K. NARAYAN A Breath of Lucifer

FRANK O’CONNOR The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland

D OROTHY PARKER The Sexes

LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA Through the Wall

JEAN RHYS La Grosse Fifi

SAKI Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER The Last Demon

WILLIAM TREVOR The Mark-􀀍 Wife

JOHN UPDIKE Rich in Russia

H. G. WELLS The Door in the Wall

EUDORA WELTY Moon Lake

P. G. WODEHOUSE The Crime Wave at Blandings

VIRGINIA WOOLF The Lady in the Looking-Glass

STEFAN ZWEIG Chess

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Book Review | ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass’ by Virginia Woolf

05 Thursday Apr 2012

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The Lady in the Looking GlassThe Lady in the Looking Glass by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After reviewing the first in this 50 book mini series, I managed to hunt down the penultimate book and found it equally as fascinating.

Virginia Woolf is one of those authors who is known for her excruciatingly deep prose; accounts that are drawn deeply from the well of life. She is better known for ‘Mrs. Dalloway‘, ‘Orlando‘ and ‘The Waves’, but in this collection of 5 short stories we are reminded that her fiction is not necessarily always so inaccessible.

It is true that Woolf was an expert at observing her surroundings. For her, stories can be drawn forth from something as simple as a reflection on a mirror or a hole in the wall. Which is precisely what she explores in ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass’ and ‘The Hole in the Wall‘. I found the former of the two to be the most poignant, as Woolf quite cleverly constructs and deconstructs her main character while retaining a consistent ‘nature morte’ stance throughout.

Her observations are glacial, fleeting and feather-light laced with a terrible feeling of bitter regret. One almost gets the feeling that Woolf might even be observing herself, as the woman in the mirror does have some striking resemblances to her. Her loneliness, love affairs, childlessness yet social vivacity is all mentioned and one can’t help but think this all rings true of Woolf herself.

Two other stories I was surprised to discover was the delightful tale ‘A Society’ which could be broadly described as a tongue-in-cheek feminist approach to the ‘man’s world’. It follows a bunch of girls who decide to question the society they live in, after coming to the decision that women do all the work bringing these men into the world, yet the men contribute very little in the way of quality to art or literature. It was nice to see Woolf’s humourous side for once; I have come to the conclusion that she was a very funny lady with a wit on par with Austen.

The other story was again an odd little gem, ‘Lappin and Lappinova’ and is a look at the delusions and realities of marriage. There are some great moments when the young couple begin to explore this new territory of married life and I rather enjoyed the allusions to hunting and rabbits.

This is a nice little showcase of all the various sides of Woolf and gives us a glimpse of her eclectic tastes and mastery of life observations.

For more blog posts on Virginia Woolf, visit my review of ‘The Waves’

View all my reviews

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Book Review | ‘The Waves’ by Virginia Woolf

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by in 1001 Book Challenge, Book Challenges, Book Review, ebooks, Excerpts

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The WavesThe Waves by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”

This was such a hard book to get into that it’s not even funny! I mean, I _KNOW_ what was going on, I know what Woolf was aiming for in the structural planning of the book, and I absolutely adore how well she kept up her water imagery. I am overwhelmed by her talent, but there is a fact that cannot be avoided; her novels are either going to be pure bliss, or absolute hell. This, to me, was hell. This disjointed narrative follows the lives of six characters whose voices intertwine to tell the story of the passing of time, how people grow from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. It is intensely nostalgic and is designed to mimic how the passing of what seems like an age, is nothing in relation to the world around us. This is perfectly symbolised by a side-narrative featuring the waves on a beach which begins each section of the novel. The end result is two stories set to two different time scales that run parallel to each other; the first being the transformation of the beach which through the duration of the novel is a mere day in relation to the storyline of the characters which spans their whole lives. This is a delicious juxtapositioning that truly works and gives the reader a sense of how fleeting life is with regards to the natural elements around us.

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

However, this wonderful structure does not help. The fact remains that I just couldn’t stop my mind from wandering off because of how damn  internalized everything is. The downfall of the novel is that everybody is talking in their own heads and no one is really interacting with each other. It lacks action which I think is fundamental necessity. It doesn’t help that we sometimes get no indication of who is speaking when, it’s very much like the characters are all insular, disembodied voices that float somewhere in the ether directly above their tangible, physical selves. Yet in direct opposition to this, there are moments when these ghostly voices word an emotion or a moment that is often more real than reality itself.

‘The Waves’ is a very complex and deeply disturbing novel that reaches into and explores the ‘self’ inside us that thinks and records our personal histories free from the restraints of language. Whenever I reach for any of Woolf’s works I have always been torn in two about her narrative style. She is either a pioneer of capturing the obliqueness of human thought, or the one who releases it from the constraints of language.

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”    

I have not yet made up my mind on what she was really aiming for as a writer. However I am certain that through her novels and short stories she was forever travelling towards the first moment of our being, when we make our initial impressions of objects and emotions that are so unbearably poignant that it hurts. I could say that ‘The Waves’ has packed full of such moments, especially the first part.

This is a novel that I’ll probably have to come back to later in order to fully appreciate it’s beauty.

For now, 2/5 stars.

This novel is now available in the public domain at:

The Gutenberg Australia website and in numerous formats on Feedbooks.com

View all my reviews

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Book Review | ‘The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

12 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in Book Review, Excerpts

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The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“A man’s honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it. “

Gilman’s prose is of the scary type. Scary for its’ intellect and practical advice for all women. First of all, she is an unapologetic feminist. These well-structured little stories could be divided into three themes which showcase Gilman’s adeptness in her art. The first third of the book displays distinct Gothic elements where houses (what Freud called the ‘Unheimliche’) become objects that reflect female repression. In ‘Yellow-Wallpaper‘, Gilman’s most famous and disturbing story, the house is portrayed as a domestic prison, a warden, and later as a mirror that depicts the awful break-down of the main character. In truth, I was not prepared for the subtle horror of the final scene due to Gilman’s clever use of language. There were also undertones to this story that paralleled partly with Virginia Woolf‘s own tragic death. Gilman’s inspiration came from personal experience after being admitted to a mental institution whereupon the regime was so bad that it almost made her lose her mind. In her preface, she states in particular how the story was written to all doctors who think total rest and complete detachment from any activity are sure cures for a curious, flexible mind.

“I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.
But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.
And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn!

I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.”

The second set of stories are mostly humorous satire’s based on the style of different well-known authors such as Austen and R.L. Stevenson. While they were well-written these did not particularly interest me so much. The last part of the book however clearly hammered home the political and socio-economic potential of women in the world. The stories prove that Gilman was a woman very much ahead of her time. The stories themselves must have caused a real stir and they are worded in such a way to stamp out any kind of protest from the ‘male chauvinistic pigs’ that she is constantly pounding.

“Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.”

While the stories were entertaining, I did tire of the overly feminist tone, and soon the plots all began to merge together. Allow me to explain: a woman at the dregs of her life (a mere 50 years old) suddenly gets the urge to live for herself for once. Her children are married off, the husband is conveniently dead, so there is nothing stopping her. The children are trying to get at her money (what little is left of it) by getting her to sell off the property and move in with them. The matriarch refuses and instead of explaining what she’ll do with her life, sets about renting off her property, setting up ‘ladies clubs’, starting up a jam-making business, whereupon in a year her income doubles and trebles. In two years she becomes a millionaire and laughs in the face of her children and everyone else who considered her a helpless good for nothing old lady. End of story.

As I said, while this is entertaining, it does get tedious. But all in all a must-read even if just for ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.

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Literary Blog Hop! – Most Difficult Literary Book You’ve Ever Read?

11 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by in Book Review, Meme, Writing

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 Don\

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:

What is the most difficult literary work you’ve ever read? What made it so difficult?

The most difficult book I’ve ever read has to be ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf. Going into it is like being hit with a  literary sledgehammer. Seriously. If you reckon you know ‘stream-of-consciousness’, then think again! ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is probably SoC perfection what with its mercurial ideas and shifting narrators. 

Mrs. Dalloway

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself… it was the moment between six and seven when every flower – roses, carnations, irises, lilac – glows, white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!”

SYNOPSIS
The story of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is set in post World War I England and is about one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a married middle-class woman who is preparing to throw a party later that evening. The novel works on a number of different themes including mental illness, existential issues, feminism and homosexuality. People who know a bit about Woolf will probably have heard about her own mental problems and her suicide. She was known to have been bisexual and a strong champion of feminist thought. All of these issues find voice in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ making it an excellent study of her life and her ideals.

The special thing about the novel is that even though it takes place over 24 hours, the story constantly shifts backwards and forwards in time. In reality, this is Woolf’s way of mimicking one day in the life of anyone’s mind, as she makes it clear that even though we are living in a constant ‘present’, our thoughts rarely ever do. The novel also has a very strong element of ‘voyeurism’ to it, as Woolf’s narrative switches from character to the next without warning, often delving into the world of private, often embarrassing thoughts. This also seems to show that people are never what they seem to be. Clarissa, a respectably married housewife entertains thoughts of suppressed love for her childhood friend Sally Bourton. Similarly, Septimus (a shell-shocked war hero) is still haunted by his commanding officer Evans. The story of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is essentially about the secret lives people live within themselves, and the things that go without saying which is rather, the omitted subtext of everyday existence.

All I can really say about this novel is that it has no ‘walls’. Yes, there is nothing to separate the thoughts of the characters or the characters themselves for that matter, because Woolf’s complete focus is on ‘memory’ and the organic behaviour of thought. Many writers have toyed with the idea of writing a novel that mimics the theatre of the mind, but few have ever got so close as to actually emulating that on paper. One of those successes being James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ gets a mention here, only because it is probably up there on the number one spot for the most difficult SoC book to read (both famous and infamous for it in equal measure!). In fact, it’s hailed as the most difficult book period, but since I haven’t read it yet, Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ takes first place for now.

When I first picked this up eight years ago, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was already a fan of Woolf, having read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and some other essays of hers, but I never counted on experiencing anything quite as modern and intuitive as the complex style she exhibits here. In fact, before reading ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ I realised I had a pretty rigid view on what makes a successful novel. Normally, a book is constructed from a number of ‘building blocks’ like themes, symbolism, etc, and the way those blocks fit into each other (much like lego) depends on the way an author structures her narrative. Woolf  however completely blew my theory to pieces; how she did it I still don’t know, but one thing is certain, her writing is as fine as gossamer and as strong as steel-wool. ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is hardly a conventional novel. I see it as a gross concentration of memories, an intense saturation of isolated, fleeting feelings and thoughts that seem to be plucked from the mind and laid directly onto paper. The ebb and flow of the story may seem erratic at first, but like a 3D picture, once you adjust yourself to the pace and the multiple story strands, it becomes a very fulfilling read.  

  If you would like to read Mrs. Dalloway for free, Project Gutenburg Australia has very kindly uploaded the book in text, zip and HTML format.

Project Gutenburg Australia has a number of free ebooks in it’s archives that cannot be found in the normal Project Gutenburg website, so check it out when you have the time!