Wouter’s Comments (group member since Nov 13, 2012)

Wouter’s comments from the The Virginia Woolf Reading Group group.

As moderator of the other group I'm always open to suggestions.

I have created a new reading group (Moments of Reading) just to get moderator rights. If you could join this group, we can have a discussion about how to read Orlando and which topics we want to discuss.

( http://www.goodreads.com/group/invite...)

I have read the novel only once at unversity during a Virginia Woolf course so now would be a good time to enjoy it instead of studying it. Can't make any promises, but I will definitely try to.

The Waves is my favourite Virginia Woolf novel, but also the toughest. I actually pencilled down the names of the characters in the margin just to keep track who is saying what.

The Wavesis about the Moment of Being, or the perception of the individual. The difficulty lies in the fact that you have to keep switching angles when you move to a different character.

The Waves really needs time and effort to get the hang of the general storyline (although I think that general storyline isn't the most important thing of the novel). However, I found it much more enjoyable than, for example, Ulysses by fellow Modernist writer James Joyce. True, Ulysses is denser than The Waves, but The Waves really gets into the moment of being, the perception of the individual.

Night and Day and The Voyage Out were the first novels written by Virginia Woolf and lack the 'Woolfian' Moment of Being. I found these novels fair enough, but not really quintessential Virginia Woolf. I didn't find her final novel Between the acts very good either (though I'm planning to re-read that one).

Mrs Dalloway would be a good starter, although my first novel was To the Lighthouse. To the Lighthouse made me mesmerized and made I eventually write my thesis on Virginia Woolf. The Waves is, to my opinion, the most difficult read. I think you should read that novel secondly, so you would already be familiar with Woolf's way of writing.

You could also read some of her short stories like "Kew Gardens", "The Mark on the Wall" or "The Fascination of the Pool", just to get an idea what kind of writer Virginia Woolf was.