Does anyone like To the Lighthouse. Why?

[lucydogz]

I keep on starting it and give up the will to live really quickly. It just rambles on and on. I'm reading it for a book group, and also think I should because it's a classic, but it's so boring. Does anyone like it?

[TheDonald]

I read it when I was 22 as light relief from my MA reading list. I read it on a beach in the Caribbean. I loved it.

Tried again last year and didn't get past the first sentence - so that's about 2 pages in!

Completely impenetrable. My brain is clearly mush 20 years after leaving Uni. I've filed it under "Life's too short" along with everything Will Self ever wrote!

[DavidPuddy]

I pretty much never give up on books but I gave up on that one. Thought it was dire, though maybe it gets better at the end, like Mrs Dalloway does.

[TheKitchenWitch]

Rambling on and on describes it perfectly. Utter tripe.

[Rattata]

I also gave up on it - did not compute

[GreenGinger2]

Was supposed to read it for my degree but read 2 pages.

[mimbleandlittlemy]

I had to do it for A level about 500 years ago. It's tedious beyond belief - but then I find all Virginia Woolf pretty tedious. I also had 3 DH Lawrence novellas on that particular paper and they were pretty grim too, while I think about it.

[SatsukiKusakabe]

I read it a long time ago and thought it was ok. I prefer Mrs Dalloway, I think.

[MiddlingMum]

I have tried so many times to like Woolf's books, but have failed so far. I can read all sorts of "difficult" fiction, and have an Eng Lit degree, but I really can't get into her work at all. Mrs Dalloway is marginally better perhaps.

[Floisme]

I didn't understand a word of it. Mrs Dalloway was only marginally better (but I really enjoyed The Hours )

[HopeClearwater]

The Hours is only redeemed by its ending though. It's bloody miserable and tedious on the way...

[WaxingGibbous]

Read for A-Level english lit many years ago.. woeful. I remember finding the stream of cosciousness technique very hard to follow. Safe to say it's a book I'll never pick up again.

[lucydogz]

ha! I've just finished it and really liked it. If it hadn't been a book group choice, I'd not have done it, but, in the end thought it was great.

[MimsyBorogroves]

Read it for uni. Massive effort and I really didn't like it - a proper slog.

[Chavelita]

I adore Woolf, and I love TTL. I love the sense of seaside-holidayishness, and the way it's so fluid and flexible, and how the point of view roams around from a six year with a massive Oedipus complex to a mother of eight children who both loves and hates being the domestic mainstay, and her emotional vampire of a husband who stomps around imagining he's a polar explorer rather than a not very successful philosopher, and the various house guests, and a child witnessing the run-up to a proposal without quite knowing that's going on.

And the 'Time Passes' section is astonishing. It starts off with everyone just going to bed and turning the lights off, and suddenly the darkness takes over and we're in the middle of WWI, and the main character and two of her children are dead, and there is only one mention of war, but all the destruction is conveyed by the way the abandoned holiday home goes back to nature over ten years.

Don't start me. I adore Woolf. Mrs Dalloway is probably a better choice for people who prefer their Woolf plottier, though. It's got a shell-shocked veteran, London in summer, an embarrassingly passionate old boyfriend home from India, a malignant lesbian governess, and a woman the heroine once kissed who reappears at a party.

[lucydogz]

yes, in my post-lighthouse realisation that I enjoy VW after all, I've started Mrs Dalloway, and it's even better. thank goodness for bookgroups, as I'd never have finished The Lighthouse otherwise. I spent 2/3 of the book thinking 'uurgh, nothings happening', and the final section finding it all makes sense.

[Chavelita]

Oh, for some reason that makes me so glad! I'm very attached to VW despite her intermittent snobberies and some appalling opinions, and some novels I like more than others. Her essays and journals are great fun, too she's always mortified about her clothes not being right, and talks with great insouciance about her knickers falling off in the street and Hermione Lee's biography of her is brilliant, if her life interests you.

[elQuintoConyo]

At university I got an A- on an essay about The Waves when i hadn't even read the book

I lived TTL and Mrs Dalloway and Orlando. Also A Room of One's Own.

My dissertation was A Psychoanalytucal Approach to Virginia Woolf. What a pretentious arse!

I haven't picked up another of her books for 20 years, I should fish out my old copy of TTL and re-read it.