The best thing about going to school is that some of my homework consists of reading books. I have always thought that since I am a teacher I should read A LOT! I should also be reading classics like Jane Eyre, Hard Times and The Mayor of Casterbridge. Being set these works as homework provides me with just enough incentive to do just that!
I’m currently on my third literature course and we’re now onto discussing literary works from the period of World War I. For this week I had to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I started reading this book 4 or 5 weeks ago and I just wasn’t able to get anywhere with it. Last weekend I had just made it halfway through the book and realised I wasn’t going to finish it in time for today. I pushed myself really hard this week to just finish the damn thing and it worked! I turned the last page yesterday evening!
It’s written in the modernist stream-of-consciousness style and especially at the beginning I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. As I reader you not only experience Clarissa’s thoughts, but a couple of other characters’ thoughts as well, which made it quite complicated. On top of that, nothing really exciting happens in the book besides the return to London of Peter Walsh – a guy who had been in love with Clarissa (Mrs Dalloway) but went to India when she married Richard Dalloway. Another ‘exciting’ event was Septimus’ suicide; he jumped out the window while his wife Rezia and his doctor was looking on. After 200-and-something pages that was about it!
Next on the list is William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. After reading a synopsis on Sparknotes, I wonder if this is going to be any easier to read…
