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To the Lighthouse
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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About this ebook
To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 by Hogarth Press two years after Mrs Dalloway and a year before Orlando. The plot – not the most important aspect at all – concerns a family’s decision to visit a lighthouse on two separate occasions, the first, unsuccessfully, when the children are young and the second, successfully, when the children are ten years older but the mother has died. The essential parts of the plot, the death of the mother and the demise of a son, are merely referred to (the first in brackets!), but are central to the tone and feel of the second part in which the initially maligned father proves his worth in the eyes of his children.
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Author
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.
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Reviews for To the Lighthouse
Rating: 3.8881663708712613 out of 5 stars
4/5
3,076 ratings124 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Lily Briscoe is a kindred spirit. She asks a pertinent question at the beginning of the final section: what does it mean then, what can it all mean? I have been asking myself that, often out loud for most of my adult life. A pair of events this weekend illuminated that disposition and likely also besmirched my reading of To The Lighthouse. My Tenth wedding anniversary was followed quickly by the funeral for my uncle Fred. The first event was grand, of course, though it does lend itself to a certain survey, of sorts. The second was simply queer. this was no great tragedy, the man was 85 years old had seven sons and had suffered through terrible health these last few years. I leaned quickly that there are no poets in that section of my family and apparently no Democrats either. It was nice to hug, slap backs and smile at one another, most of the time counting the decades since we last spoke at length. Through the depths of such I ran to the Woolf and read for an odd half hour here and there.
To the Lighthouse is a tale of caprice and desperation. It is a kaleidoscope of resonance and impressions. Much like life it can be dusty and wind swept on an even manner. I would likely have been great affected were it not for the switchbacks of the weekend. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5There are books I’ve had on my shelves that I have always meant to read, and that I feel I ought to have read. To The Lighthouse was one of those books, so I took it with me on holiday and read it.But I didn’t really know what it was about, and it’s a strange book to encounter if you have no preconceptions. The first section, with its cloyingly deep analysis of the minutia of life, hundreds of pages where nothing much happens except they go to dinner, all the Meaning trapped in ‘do you think it will be fine enough to go to the Lighthouse tomorrow?’ ‘No, I think it will not be fine’. Marriage and motherhood and thwarted career ambitions and hosting and matchmaking, and the way the smallest thing can hold so much meaning. I found it quite intractable and frustrating at first, and then found a rhythm and a sympathy and settled into it...... when all at once I hit the second part and the book simultaneously broke my brain and my heart. Ten years pass in a flurry of pages. People we had known down to the grain on their fingerprints are casually dispatched in passing in the final sentence of a paragraph. The house slowly decays, the bubble that has been there so clearly is gone, as the dust and mould creep in.And then in the final part we are there again, and are drawn into musing around what fingerprints do we leave on the world, how are we remembered, what is success? Those complex family relationships, so much love and anger tangled up,and all inside, no ripples on the surface. But we paint. And we make it to the Lighthouse.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/53-2-17
Tonight I finished Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”
Wowzers, it’s really great. This was my first reading of Woolf, and I was really hypnotized by her style. It was an emotional rollercoaster, and I highly recommend you ride it. A very quick read, under 200 pages, and it just flows and flows. Lyrical. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book reads more like a poem than a novel. Evocative, fragile, nuanced, ephemeral moments of family life set in a gorgeous landscape. It would make a beautiful arthouse movie with long scenes filled with stark seascapes and little action.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Impressionistic rather than descriptive. Divided in three parts. The first, and the longest, serves as an introduction to the setting, the characters, and their interactions. And this part was tough going, especially towards the end, simply because nothing really happens in the first part, and yet it keeps on going, without any real purpose. Characters were kept at a stand-still, just so that the author could paint a detailed picture. My 21st century attention span -- used as it is to snappy, streamlined characterization and world-building -- made me put the book down a few timesThe second and third parts, though, are very much worth the effort of struggling through that lengthy set-up. This is where [To the lighthouse] comes into its own: once you understand what’s going on, the whole thing pays off beautifully.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5a family goes to the same vacation house through the years
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The language is so beautifully evocative. The careful echoing of the longer first section, which allows the reader to meet and understand the Ramseys and Lily Briscoe in particular, with the concluding section where Lily (the artist) is forced to come to terms with what it all means is balanced by the much briefer middle part. That section is where we learn of the events of the painful period of Mrs. Ramsey's death, World War II and the passage of time. It functions as a sort of intercession for both the reader and Lily, allowing us to gain perspective (almost without realizing it) on how "we perish, each alone." Such a very powerful book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zeer moeilijke lectuur, maar met ongelofelijk veel intellectueel genoegen. Gaat over eindigheid en dood, kijken naar het leven. Zeer beeldend. Om te herlezen en herlezen.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It is official. I am not a Virginia Woolf guy. I appreciated this book more than Mrs. Dalloway, but I still struggled with it. Basically there is no plot to this story, but it is simply a look inside the minds of the characters and their rapid, deep, and depressing judgements of themselves and those around them. The language is beautiful, and the insights into the thoughts and behaviors of people are fascinating to think about, but it is just too dark for me. If people really thought that poorly of each other, this would be one heck of a sad world to live in. Also, it is too much work to judge the words and actions of others so consistently rather than simply enjoy being in their presence.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5There are moments of great crystalline beauty here, seamless amalgam of little sharp perceptions and language their vehicle, and I won't forget this family, in particular the two parents, in whom I see so much of archetype, of my parents and my friends' parents transfigured and ennobled by, well, class, I suppose. Mrs Ramsey regal and anxious, Mr Ramsey needy and forbidding, which is almost another (male) way of saying the same thing. But a sprawling family deserved a sprawling novel that would let the modernist psychological superstructure unfold at a less compressed pace. I feel like that pressure relief would have led to fewer "But what is it all? And what does it all mean? And what are ... WE???"-type eruptions. Sure am glad James made it to the Lighthouse and had a moment with his dad though.(On class: the last gasps of compulsive Victorian world-building as well as Victorian formality are on display here, and it's affecting to watch that world list and capsize and the hard-won homeliness of it convert into something more twentieth-century and atomized. But I guess that made the proscribed lighthouse trip possible?)
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Typical Woolf. Long sentences. Inner dialogues showing way too much overthinking. Way too much detail over little nothings. Tiring. Nothing exactly happens in the the book. Things happen between chapters, then characters start the next chapter thinking about what happened. But we never see what happens.But poor James spent 10 years waiting to get his visit to the lighthouse. Which we don't actually get to see or hear about, because the book ends as they begin getting out of the book.Glad it's done. Glad it was short.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Absolutely breathtaking literature.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Exquisite. (*****)
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I read this book in university and I remembered I didn't like it. So this summer I decided to read it again to find out why I didn't like it. I soon realized the reason. It is a very confusing book for me to try and read. The sentences go on forever which makes me forget what I was reading about in the first place. I have read the first 8 chapters and I barely know what is going on so I've decided to put the book back on the shelf.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I found it frustrating to read, as little actually occurred in the book, with the content made up almost entirely of the leisurely musings of the English upper-class. On the other, I enjoyed the thoughts on art and I liked seeing the character of Lily grow into a more confident artist. I had some inner laughs at Mr. Ramsay, who in the second half of the novel finds himself in a difficult place without his wife to consistently praise him and his work. I did find the style in which this book was written, the focus on perception without much dialogue or action, difficult to read and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is wary of those writing styles.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Although I think I like Mrs. Dalloway better, this wasn't bad.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I feel like I need cliff notes and a college level lecture on this one. There was just so much going on in this...every sentence heavy with meaning and infused with hidden feeling. The inner lives of Edwardians who perhaps grew up in the Victorian era...so repressed and filled with the expectations of society, struggling not to be themselves, but to even find themselves in the first place.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not much of a plot in this work of dreamy prose. But still worth a read, if just to suck from the marrow of these sentences. Being a short work one, can read it over and over again.,
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had close to the same feeling about these characters as I had to the ones in The Age of Innocence, which is to say, close to none. The writing here, however, was much better, as it seems to me, so there's that.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Found this book a hard slog because of the amount of commas in Virginia Woolf's writing, because of this found it hard to really engage with the book.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/52.5 stars
Woolf writes beautifully, but I think the form of her novel just isn't for me. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zeer moeilijke lectuur, maar met ongelofelijk veel intellectueel genoegen. Gaat over eindigheid en dood, kijken naar het leven. Zeer beeldend. Om te herlezen en herlezen.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was my second Woolf book and I'm no closer to being a fan of this author than at any other time of my life. Lighthouse was much more enjoyable than Waves, but I won't be rereading either of them any time soon.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Madison Westin is a recent divorcee trying to get her life back on track. When her aunt dies, she learns that she has been left her aunt’s home and a beachfront motel in Tarpon Cove, Florida. The good news is that she feels comfortable relocating to Florida and taking over the property management. The bad news is that the estate lawyer and current property management don't want her involved in the management of the motel. Things in Tarpon Cove aren't what they appear to be, and Madison quickly becomes suspicious about the estate attorney's behavior, to say nothing of the onsite property manager. Both are acting as if she is an intruder rather than the property owner and refuse to cooperate with her desire to know more about the tenants or the property. If that isn't bad enough, Madison discovers a hunky guy, a bleeding hunky guy, at her aunt's house after the funeral. Zach Lazarro is a private investigator and was a friend of her aunt Elizabeth. He wasn't aware of her death and came seeking first aid. He winds up staying for a few days to recuperate.Madison has a lot to deal with, including what appears to be an unscrupulous attorney and property manager. If that wasn't bad enough, she also must contend with Zach and his family drama issues.CRAZY IN PARADISE by Deborah Brown is a fast romantic suspense read, which regrettably I found to be somewhat lacking in both romance and suspense. To be fair, Zach and Madison struggle to find common ground and build on their attraction. The action of the bad guys is expected and therefore isn't mysterious and there doesn't seem to be any suspense involved when everything is expected. Having said that, and again in all fairness, this isn't a bad read. The action may be somewhat expected and the characters perhaps not as fully developed as possible, but CRAZY IN PARADISE is still a pretty decent read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Subtle and elegant. Perhaps in a strange way, because we've so absorbed her lessons into the style of serious writing over the last 95 years, the effect is slightly muted in 2021. But gosh she really found her voice, didn't she?
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I'm sorry but of the thousands of books I've read in my lifetime (I'm 74) this book, despite it being placed on a top 100 must-read books list, is in my opinion, unreadable. It just does not flow; there's no link between characters and actions. I'm obviously missing the big picture here and if so, please tell me what it is.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Woolf's strange use of time was effective in result albeit uninteresting. Her characters are similar, in that their psychologies are (sporadically) interesting even if they aren't. Perhaps this isn't my kind of book; I got very little out of it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Luckily I was in the mood to immerse myself in these word pictures, these impressions and suggestions of characters, because this is a very literary book, with little narrative drive. You have to be prepared to read this slowly and uninterruptedly.However, allowing for these demands, it is wonderful experiment with language, difficult to explain without surrendering to the hypnotic prose, elegaic. The middle section, Time Passes, is like an epiphany (or was when I was reading it).
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Many of the themes and motifs were poignant, thought-provoking, and extremely relevant to my current phase in life. I enjoyed the depth of thought and meaning buried within the text, but I did not enjoy Woolf's verbose and clause-laden style (it was difficult to follow). I may have enjoyed the book more with a bit more plot or "action", but the most interesting pieces of the story are glossed over (intentionally). I "get" it. But I didn't enjoy it.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I am not sure that I finished it because everyone was talking, or I should say thinking, all at once. I got confused. I got lost. I finished it. I think.
Kudos to those who liked it and gave 5-star reviews.
Reading this book is a little like riding a bronco. You either manage to ride it to the end or, like me, keep falling off.