I have a profound loathing for Virginia Woolf’s writings. Not the woman, I think she was awesome. Her writing. It’s personal, and possibly shallow, and has mostly to do with my mother: she loved Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, and forced me to read it when I was young, possibly in an attempt to make me understand something about life, but I harbour a profound loathing for bourgeoisie people who sit on their asses and complain they’re bored and don’t take action to change their miserable lives, and the result was a transfer of that profound loathing to Virginia Woolf’s writings instead. Get off your ass, go to the freaking lighthouse and stop wasting my time already.
This collection was non-fiction, though, and I had a superficial knowledge of that part of her production, mostly limited to “A Room of one’s own,” so I was curious.
It didn’t go well.
Here’s a list of the pieces, which come from different collections:
- Nothing but this: we have loved reading:
- “How Should One Read a Book?” which left nothing in me;
- “Women and Fiction,” very nice and the kind of contribution I was looking for;
- “Craftmanship,” which I couldn’t see the point of.
- To look, for example, at the sky…
- “The Sun and the Fish,” a trip;
- “On Being Ill,” intimate and of course respectable for that;
- “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car,” evocative and pretty.
- How Beautiful a London Street is, picking up on the mood from “Reflections in a Motor Car” gets to describing apparently trivial stuff:
- “Great Men’s Houses,” really cutting-deep and interesting;
- “Oxford Street Tide,” which was okay for the social commentary and little else;
- “Flying Over London”;
- “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”.
Some points are interesting enough, and the short essay on houses and people and everyday life was very insightful. The one on flying was also good, except no one was flying anywhere and it’s the Lighthouse all over again. The rest, quite frankly, is fluff. It landed on my brain as audiobooks do: there’s a voice reading words, they sound pleasant, but nothing is sticking. The voice was my own, this time, but it’s the same.
If you like this, I’d like to dissect your brain to see what’s missing in mine.
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