Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Fiction
Published 1925

I always kind of thought that reading Virginia Woolf's work would be tedious and awful, and probably just way over my head. Turns out I was completely wrong. Woolf is amazing.

Mrs. Dalloway follows a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an older woman in London, as she prepares for a party that night. It also moves through the lives of the people around her, and through everyone's past and present, in a beautifully and poetically strange way. The entire book takes place in one day - the novel is neatly organized by the regular ringing of Big Ben - but it's rich with many lifetimes of meaning. (Re-reading that sentence, I sound pretty obnoxious, but it's so true that I'm going to leave it in.)

I don’t know if I’ve ever read another book that inspired me so much to write, and write well. I wanted to read it aloud to everyone around me. It is a tribute to life. And somehow it still manages to be thoroughly entertaining.

Granted, Woolf's writing needs to be gotten used to. It's poetic writing, a little dense and a little flowery. I had to read this tiny novel in little chunks. Once I got into it, though, I was only reading slowly because I wanted to savor every word, not because I needed the time to make sense of it.