I tried really hard to like this book. In many ways it should be wonderful: a complex, layered slice of English lives. But it never really feels like it gets started -- it perfectly gets across the phenomenology of being at a party and not quite knowing everyone, or catching sight of yourself in a mirror and wondering how you got there in life, which seems to be what Woolf was trying to do. But this ends being a bit self-defeating, because the whole thing is so well-observed and so true to life and covers so much ground that everyone already knows what these things feel like anyway! Felt a bit like reading a dictionary in one's own language.
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HugoHeagren's books
2025 Reading Goal
22% complete! HugoHeagren has read 9 of 40 books.
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HugoHeagren finished reading Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language by John Searle
HugoHeagren finished reading I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
HugoHeagren finished reading Notes from Underground and the Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground and the Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground (pre-reform Russian: Записки изъ подполья; post-reform Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapíski iz podpólʹya; also translated as Notes …
HugoHeagren wants to read Cracks in the Ivory Tower by Jason Brennan
HugoHeagren wants to read The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
The Evolution of Cooperation is a 1984 book by political scientist Robert Axelrod that expanded a highly influential paper of …
HugoHeagren wants to read The Recognitions by William Gaddis
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Obsessed with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, Wyatt Gwyon forges original artwork amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time.
HugoHeagren started reading Notes from Underground and the Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground and the Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground (pre-reform Russian: Записки изъ подполья; post-reform Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapíski iz podpólʹya; also translated as Notes …
HugoHeagren finished reading Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
HugoHeagren wants to read All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles
HugoHeagren started reading Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
HugoHeagren reviewed The Years by Virginia Woolf
Not great
2 stars
HugoHeagren finished reading The Years by Virginia Woolf
HugoHeagren wants to read Stoner by John Williams
Stoner by John Williams
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the …
HugoHeagren wants to read Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground (pre-reform Russian: Записки изъ подполья; post-reform Russian: Записки из подполья, tr. Zapíski iz podpólʹya), also translated as …