To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Exquisite! It took me a few pages to get into the voice and Woolf’s style of fluidly shifting from one perspective to the next. But once I was immersed, this slender book carried me all the way to the end. Each of the three parts is so wonderful, emotional, and revelatory, I felt almost a part of this house and the family, and buoyed along by Woolf’s prose like that little boat out on the distant water. And for my money, Lily Briscoe’s meditations on painting are the most accurate description I’ve read of the writing act, something at once heartbreakingly beautiful and infuriatingly elusive.
Reading To the Lighthouse I had an immediate sense that I would re-read this book many times, and that gives me a great sense of pleasure for my future reading self.