This was a long weekend for us Canadians, celebrating the birthday of Queen Victoria. It is also a significant long weekend that kinda marks the beginning of warm days, if not official summer (that starts on Summer Solstice).

I had a few aims for this weekend. 

I wanted to finish going through our clothes from winter to summer, and get rid of all that needed to not stick around- so either donated, or too far gone for consumption. 

That being done, my other big aim for the weekend was to finish “To The Lighthouse”. 

Since this Virginia Woolf book is my choice for our bookclub to discuss this month, I wanted to get through it in good time, and think more about it. And thankfully I did.

It has to be one of the harder fiction books I have read. It was very abstract, in the sense that there doesn’t much happen anywhere, but all 300 pages of it is mostly us getting to know the various characters through their thoughts or their situations from other people’s thoughts. The whole point of the book, I think, is to make it to the Lighthouse on an island from where the Ramsey family spends their summers in a small town on the coast of Scotland (I believe?). And there are other friends and acquaintances that are around that form part of the narrative.

Everything moves slowly. There is no real plot here. But just situations. And characters. Who are stuck in their own drama of life.

The amazing thing about this book was that even though the going was hard for me, and there was no action to keep me hooked, I wanted to keep on reading. The language is rich, and the small feelings that the author has captured in people’s thoughts made me stop and read again. Because I too have felt them, but never seen them, or myself have verbalized them. Woolf certainly caught the minutest of nuances of human nature.

After finishing it, I was curious to see how the book would sound in an audio format. It’s was a great thing that it was available on Libby through the Toronto Library, without any holds. So I started listening to it, and suddenly, the cobwebs seemed to have parted, and the book made so much more sense! 

Now, I don’t know if it made more sense because it was my second time through it right after I finished reading it. Or because this book, a stream of consciousness writing, was more suitable to hear it as if someone is telling us stuff as their brain meanders from thought to another thought- the way we converse with friends when we have the time, and listeners.

Either ways, I am enjoying it all the more for having listening to it, and so happy I had this brilliant idea.

It sure is a hard book. And with today’s distracted way we read, especially things online, it is a great exercise in patience and developing focus to get through a book like this and make sense of it.

Would I recommend it? Well, it would depend on who you are. I do not think it is everyone’s cup of tea. But I sure loved reading it…