Il lettore comune

It’s appropriate that my 100th GR review should be a book that attempts to shift literary criticism from the hallowed office into the sitting room as all of us here on Goodreads are “the common reader”, a voice that in Woolf’s day barely existed. In the final essay she has a dig at (her) contemporar Leggi tutto

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | | Throughout the course of my undergraduate degree I consistently and persistently avoided Virginia Woolf’s body of work as on the best of days I have little patience for stream of consciousness (especially of the Joycean variety) and modernist literature. When my lectur Leggi tutto

This is a bit like having Virginia Woolf on Goodreads. It's a collection of essays about the books she reads. Her observations are so imaginatively lively and creatively formulated that it was a joy to read even when I didn't know the authors she was writing about. Many of the books she tackles are

By turns delightful, instructive, and illuminating. I don't think I've done so much simultaneous marking and laughing aloud since school. One of the great pleasures was in learning about writers I knew nothing about, from the famous ones to the totally obscure. Woolf could summarize like nobody's bu Leggi tutto

The common reader... differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whate Leggi tutto