To The Lighthouse

By Virginia Woolf,

Book cover of To The Lighthouse

Book description

ā€œRadiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.ā€ā€”Eudora Welty, from the Introduction.Theā€¦

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Why read it?

5 authors picked To The Lighthouse as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This novel is a dream for me. I havenā€™t read anything as moving and beautiful; in fact, this remains one of the very few novels I can read again and again, receiving something new from it each time. I love the liquid-like, ephemeral storytelling where the narrator expertly descends into the minds and souls of each character, brilliantly showing what they are feeling and thinking.

I love how multifaceted the women characters areā€”they baffle, frustrate, soothe, and inspire the novelā€™s moments of transcendence. The setting in rural, seaside England is also especially evocative, and I love how elements of theā€¦

Virginia Woolf knew ā€“ she insisted ā€“ that a life spent maintaining a house, throwing dinner parties, and taking children on sailing expeditions was not necessarily, not categorically, a trivial life.

Even a modest, domestic life is still, for the person living it, an epic journey, however ordinary it might appear to the outside observer. Woolf refused to dismiss lives that most male writers ignore or even denigrate.

And you can get lost in her magnificent sentences; no one puts words together as beautifully as Virginia Woolf.

To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolfā€™s most autobiographical novel.

Ostensibly set in Scotland, Woolf is describing her own childhood holidays in Talland House, St Ives Cornwall which gave her intense happiness. The story is of the Ramsay family and their friends (who stand in for Woolfā€™s family) on vacation.

Lily Briscoe, an artist is painting Mrs Ramsayā€™s portrait which Lily completes after Mrs Ramsayā€™s sudden death; and Lily has her ā€˜visionā€™. Beautifully evocative of Cornish landscape, Woolf captures the inner feelings of characters impressionistically and movingly.

I took Woolfā€™s Lily Briscoe as my heroine in my novel and depict herā€¦

From Maggie's list on why art matters (in our lives).

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Book cover of The Ballad of Falling Rock

The Ballad of Falling Rock by Jordan Dotson,

Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: ā€œAre his love songs closer to heaven than dying?ā€ Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard itā€¦

If you like thinking about moments when weā€™re able to touch the pulse of reality, Virginia Woolf is your friend. Her novels aim to ā€œgo deeperā€ into the submerged lives of her characters, to imagine what it felt like for them to sit in a room, thinking of someone they used to know, watching a treeā€™s branches through the window swaying in the storm, all while trying to hold on to a coherent sense of themselves as people in the world. To The Lighthouse is a masterpiece within this bigger project, set largely in just two days in the lifeā€¦

From Laurence's list on touching the reality of modern life.

I remember buying a Penguin paperback of To the Lighthouse at a Boy Scout book fair and being bowled over by the beauty of the prose. This is what a novel should be, I feltā€” a work of art. Here is a prose writer writing poetic prose of such lyrical beauty and still able to encapsulate the essence of life in something so simple as a protracted holiday visit to a lighthouse. In so doing Woolf captures the longing of a small boy by means of a stream of consciousness of painterly and lilting prose. It also trawls the memoriesā€¦

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Book cover of The Ballad of Falling Rock

The Ballad of Falling Rock by Jordan Dotson,

Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: ā€œAre his love songs closer to heaven than dying?ā€ Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard itā€¦

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