Virginia Woolf's Non-Fiction

Virginia Woolf's Non-Fiction - Where to Start?

Рет қаралды 328

Күн бұрын

Listen to me say the words 'highly recommend' way too many times! I just really like Virginia Woolf....
Books mentioned:
- A Room of One's Own
- The Common Reader (Series 1 and 2)
- A Writer's Diary
- Love Letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
- Three Guineas
- Moments of Being
- The Essays of Virginia Woolf (shown is Volume 1, 1904-1921)
Thank you for watching!

Пікірлер: 14

@circleofleaves2676 10 ай бұрын

I'm' one of the diehard Virginia Woolf readers/nerds. I have just under 50 books on my shelf that are either by or about Virginia Woolf (fiction, essays, diaries, letters, biographies etc). I finally jumped in this year and got myself a first edition of The Waves, both my favourite VW book and my favourite book of all time. Bound by the Hogarth Press, purple cloth, but not with a dust jacket, because that would have hiked up the price massively to several thousand instead of a few hundred. I had wanted one for about 20 years.

@TheEclecticLibrary 10 ай бұрын

I'm still at the beginning of my Woolf obsession, but I'm glad I'm not the only one! What a wonderful find, that copy of The Waves. I'm so glad you get to have it! I was thrilled to have found a Hogarth copy of both The Common Reader as well as Flush, both from 1933, for a really decent price

@patricialux6197 6 ай бұрын

Discovering your channel. Late to see and comment, but ive got VW books but havent quite caught on yet, will be trying again. I LOVE vita Sackville-West & just got the letters between them, enjoying so much!

@TheEclecticLibrary 6 ай бұрын

I'm so glad you're enjoying the letters! I can't wait to read more from V S-W, her writing in the letters is gorgeous

@none8680 10 ай бұрын

As I'm not a great fan of nonfiction in general, I never gave her nonfiction works a try, despite considering her novels some of my most favourite books of all time. But now you just convinced me to get a copy of the common reader. Thanks♡

@TheEclecticLibrary 10 ай бұрын

That's wonderful! Hope you'll love her non-fiction too

@angelacraw2907 10 ай бұрын

Great video. Thank you for posting. I read most of Woolf's fiction, a Room of One's Own and started the Common Reader last year. So, your video has spurred me on to finish CR and perhaps stray into a couple of others too. I also read a good chunk of a biography by Hermione Lee, but it's quite weighty and academic. I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of her beautiful style and the scope of her work.

@TheEclecticLibrary 10 ай бұрын

So glad you enjoy Woolf too! I have yet to tackle Hermione Lee's work - I've heard it's excellent. Perhaps for once I've exhausted Woolf's own writing!

@user-xx1lm2mw3h 10 ай бұрын

You have a nice voice 👍

@TheEclecticLibrary 10 ай бұрын

Thank you!

@shaunholt 10 ай бұрын

I tried "To the Lighthouse" and completely forget what I didn't like about it, I don't remember anything about it and imagine I only read 5-20 pages. Unfortunately, "Orlando", "A Moment's Liberty" and "The Common Reader" are also on a list of 1,000 books to read that I'm working on, so I have to try them at some point. 0:17 Ah, that's probably what I didn't like. I apparently HATE stream of consciousness writing. I HATED every one I've tried. - Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (my most hated book of all-time) - Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett - everything by William Faulkner - Dubliners by James Joyce, and also uses hyphens instead of quotation marks. I refuse to read any books that do not use quotation marks for dialogue, with the only exception being Cry The Beloved Country by Alan Paton since I have a signed copy now and think it deserves a second try. Marcel Proust, Toni Morrison, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henry James are other stream of consciousness writers on the Top 1,000 list, but I'll give them short leashes.

@shaunholt 10 ай бұрын

I just don't like or respect stream of consciousness writing. I think it's garbage. To me, it feels like I could write every one of these stream of consciousness books in two days without even thinking, just as a first draft, without even trying, just turn my brain off and write whatever, and it would be as good or better than these "classic" novels. So I just hate stream of consciousness writing. I think it's garbage. Like poetry. 🙃 I don't respect it as an art form.

@TheEclecticLibrary 10 ай бұрын

Ha, stream of consciousness is not for everyone! One thing I've found is that it is way easier to digest (for me at least) through audiobook. Then the narrator has to do the hard work of actually parsing the run-on sentences into something intelligible. Same for books without quotation marks. I also can't quite be bothered to read those with my eyeballs, especially if they don't use punctuation at all. What list of 1000 books are you reading from? (I've heard of several doing the rounds) I hope you'll get on with the slightly less streamy stream-of-consciousness authors! I've never minded it much in Dostoyevsky, though I didn't get on with Catcher in the Rye either. As for poetry, I mainly appreciate it as a historical form. If you go back far enough, pretty much everything fiction was poetry as it evolved from oral storytelling. On one hand it's pretty ridiculous that Dante wrote more than ten thousand lines where every line is exactly 11 syllables and then rhymed every other sentence, but I admire the sheer level of dedication he put into it 😂

@shaunholt 10 ай бұрын

@@TheEclecticLibrary That's insane with Dante. Why I often try to point out that reading a translated work can never do justice to the original. There are things that are always lost in translation. The Top 1,000 book is 1,000 books to read before you die by James Mustich. I'm around 200.