Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

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The problem with my local library is I go in for one book and then see ten others I’ve been intending to read, and then they let me have them for free. And so I finally got around to reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf.   The actual plot is pretty well known, and it turns out I could have summarised it before reading the novel itself: Orlando is an Elizabethan nobleman who suffers disappointments as both a lover and a writer. He leaves England for […]

So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches…

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

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So I am going to spoil this novel about part way through the review, and I will indicate that it’s coming, so be forewarned. This is Virginia Woolf’s third novel, and according to my looking into it, this one forms a kind of departure in style. I haven’t read The Voyage Out or Night and Day, her first two novels, but I have read her next two novels after this one, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and given those two, it surprises me not that this book situates in a kind […]

Lately my diet has become a trifle monotonous

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A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf is a short, classic, feminist treatise, and it was on my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40. I know very little about Virginia Woolf. I vaguely remember having to read Mrs. Dalloway in school, but I think I was too young to really appreciate it. I never even saw The Hours with Nicole Kidman. So, I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I began reading this book. A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay […]

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

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I think I keep doing Book Riot’s Read Harder challenges because they do force me to look through my epic list of books to read and get out of my own comfort zone and read with more variety. I have many startling gaps in my reading history, and Virginia Woolf’s entire oeuvre is one. I have seen or read exactly one of Woolf’s works before reading A Room of One’s Own (Orlando at the Yale School of Drama about 8 years ago while a friend […]

To the lighthouse (I can’t come up with a better or more poetic title than that)

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 “What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” In the summer, a family travels to a house on the top of a hill with the view of a lighthouse. A woman and her son look out to the lighthouse. He wants to […]

Woolf Pack: this title is for you!

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I took a Virginia Woolf seminar as an undergrad ten years ago in the spring, and it proved to be enlightening and a catalyst for my career in twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction. We read 9-10 full-length works, including Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and The Years. I also read Orlando and Night and Day on my own and liked them both immensely. I’ve been meaning to read Between the Acts for several years, but it’s been hard to track down. […]



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