To the Lighthouse
This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever.In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships. From an acute awareness of transcience, she creates an enduring work of art.
Stats for nerds
11recommend
30mentions
26people
2012–2025years
43% recommend57% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- With the really young kids you could lead with One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are lots of times you're not really showing them pictures in the book—or they're too young even for that, really, can't focus their eyes well—and they just need to hear the sounds and flow of language, not to understand every word (or any words). I read mine To the Lighthouse and shit like that, it was great, I think each kid got three or four "classics" while very young. I could pare down my own to-read list while being "a good parent", LOL, felt like a cheat code.
- I am also a fan of lists, and I would say that as far as lists of "great books" go, an aggregated view would look like:
To the Lighthouse > Mrs. Dalloway > Orlando > A Room of One's Own = The Waves
- Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando are under a 4. But under a 4 is guaranteed bad? LOLWUT.
And that’s just the first author I checked.
Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick (less of a crowd pleaser than his handful of biggest books, but certainly not in the bottom tier of his works) is under a 4. The A Man Without a Country collection, which is more of interest as a curiosity than because much of it’s good, is over a 4.
Yeah, you may as well flip a coin.
- I bailed on Fellowship about 50 pages from the end, I think. Gandalf had just fallen a few pages back. Hated it, enjoyed basically zero pages I’d read. And I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of other fantasy, and routinely read long fiction books (mostly “classics”) that’d bore a lot of folks to tears. My favorite book is To the Lighthouse and about a third of it’s about an empty house. I finished every page of Lichteim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature (all three volumes!) and hot damn was a lot of that boring. I like the Telemachus books of The Odyssey.
LOTR, though, was too boring for me, just couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t stomach one more elf song or backstory of a tree. Though I acknowledge that’s probably some very-specific pathology of mine, rather than the book’s fault. I do seem to be wrong, in a sense, in this judgement.
Oddly enough, I later read The Hobbit, and loved that.
I do enjoy the Peter Jackson films (extended, especially for ROTK, which kinda sucks in its theatrical cut)
- Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf
Before this book I generally did not read, unless it was a Star Trek branded airport novel. I had just got an iPad and was rummaging around the Project Gutenberg texts they’d dumped into iBooks. I chose it impulsively.
This book set my brain and heart on fire and opened the world of literature for me. It’s very specific, though, and I can’t -recommend- it to anyone.
There is little spackle in this book, as if every sentence and scene is cropped a bit beyond the point of readability. But reading aloud it flows well. There is effectively no plot and a great deal of its merit is at the sentence level. Furthermore, this book in particular resonated with me emotionally.
I was thirsty for more and read other classics. My favorites; To the Lighthouse, Picture of Dorian Grey and Thus Spake Zarathustra (the translation they have on Gutenberg).
This hobby dominated my attention for years. What displaced it was I had to learn Polish. At first I tried to combine these; I read Charlotte’s Web, the Little Prince and Pulp (bukowski) in Polish. But it really wasn’t an effective way to continue and Polish was the priority. All other hobbies had to go.
- People take issue with them, but picking something off Adler's or Harvard's (five-foot-shelf) or Bloom's Great Books lists will almost never lead you wrong.
But, here we go anyway (and yeah, some of these are just off those lists):
1) Shakespeare's big four tragedies are, in fact, out-fucking-standing. Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth. IMO Hamlet reads the best of those. Any would be fine to watch, as well, and may be better that way. The language, especially, is easier to understand when performed, because you have body language, tone, and other context to work with.
2) Gilgamesh. I like Mitchell's edition.
3) The Odyssey. Iliad's a bit of a bore, but with a few incredible scenes that really stick with you. The Odyssey, though, is great. Screw the haters, even the "Telemachy" portion is good.
4) Revolutionary Road by Yates, for a certain kind of struggle with identity & purpose that I suspect will resonate and provide a useful mirror for lots of folks on here.
5) Woolf's To the Lighthouse is probably my favorite book, so I'll throw that on here.
6) The 20th century gave us tons of essayists (some of whom also wrote novels and such) who are great reads. Orwell, C.S. Lewis, and Forster all come to mind.
7) Maugham wrote a lot of novels, and most of them are well worth a read.
8) Farmer's Riverworld series are probably my favorite very dumb books.
