WWW Wednesday, 1-February-2017

Welcome to WWW Wednesday! This meme was formerly hosted by MizB at A Daily Rhythm and revived here on Taking on a World of Words. Just answer the three questions below and leave a link to your post in the comments for others to look at. No blog? No problem! Just leave a comment with your responses. Please, take some time to visit the other participants and see what others are reading. So, let’s get to it!

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Note: For users of Blogspot blogs, I’m unable to comment on your posts as a WordPress blogger unless you’ve enabled Name/URL comments. This is a known WordPress/Blogspot issue. Please consider enabling this to participate more fully in the community.

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Currently reading: I’m getting very close to the end of Misterio de la Guia de Ferrocarriles by Agatha Christie. It takes a lot of effort for me to read it, but I’m getting toward the end and can feel Poirot closing in on the murderer!
No move on Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs. It will likely be until my road trip later this month before we make any headway on this one.
I’m already on the third chapter of The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. I was fortunate to have a few lunches to read last week and I got into it. I like it so far but I’m curious to see where Swyler goes with it and why she chose to have a male narrator.

Recently finished: I finished World Without End by Ken Follett after my post went up last Wednesday. I loved it! My review went up Monday. A full 5 out of 5 stars.
I also finished Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf which was slightly less enjoyable. Many of you thought it might be because I listened to it and I think that’s probably right. Still, it wasn’t one I really enjoyed. 2 out of 5 stars. My review went up yesterday.

I also posted a review for The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge which went up last Thursday. Not my favorite of Bainbridge’s novels, but still enjoyable and very educational. 3 out of 5 stars.

Reading Next: I’m so close to starting Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling! I can almost feel it haha. I see it on my shelf almost every day and I can’t wait to pull it down and dig in.
I’ll be starting a new audiobook today, Away by Amy Bloom. I put this one on my list because it’s a 1920s era book. I own a copy which I found at a book warehouse but in order to get through my TBR faster, I’m going to listen to it.

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Leave a comment with your link and a comment (if you’re so inclined). Take a look at the other participant links in the comments and look at what others are reading.

Have any opinions on these choices?

Until next time, write on.

You can follow me on Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. I’m available via email at SamAStevensWriter@gmail.com. And as always, feel free to leave a comment!

Book Review: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (2/5)

I think it was my cousin who said I would like this book. It was easily available on audio so I decided to give it a try once I finished some nice, long audiobooks and was looking for something shorter. I now know that my cousin hates me, so that’s refreshing. This book drove me crazy and I’m trying to be polite and think that listening to it rather than reading it made it worse than it would have been otherwise. I’m trying to be nice.

Cover image via Goodreads

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Summary from Goodreads:

In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman’s life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with far-away remembrances. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices she has made, hesitantly looking ahead to growing old.

I couldn’t stand the scream of consciousness in this book. I got so confused as to who was narrating and if what I was hearing was narration or thought and it was beyond frustrating as an audiobook. The only thing I really got out of the book is that everyone is very selfish except for Lucrezia. It made me want to smack Clarissa and punch Peter for being so full of themselves. Maybe they should have ended up together. They might not have noticed because they would have been so caught up in themselves that they wouldn’t bother to talk to the other. I was frustrated with most of the characters and I found some of them, like Dr. Holmes, unnecessary in the plot. I read that Clarissa’s story is supposed to parallel Septimus’ but I didn’t see that very well. I thought she might end up dead like he did but, alas, this isn’t The Awakening.

I hope most of these characters are an exaggeration of real people. Clarissa was so distraught over not being invited to a luncheon and others are so upset over not being invited to her dinner party. Richard seems to forget that he’s married at all and seems blown away by the idea he should show affection toward his wife. I hope these characters are a reflection of their time; when relationships between people were less familiar than the ones we see today. The thoughts that the characters scared was slightly scary only because some of them were so extreme.

Lucrezia was my favorite character only because she was the most logical person to me. Everyone was pining after someone else but I thought it more reasonable that she was pining after a healthy version of her husband and not a lost friend, lost love, or a version of herself she’d never achieve. She really cared for her husband and was doing all she could to keep him in his right mind and help him get better.

As much as I hated Clarissa, I could relate to her pining for her past and wanting to know how things could have been different if she’d made different choices. I think everyone thinks this way sometimes. If I’d chosen a different college or dated a different person in high school, would I have ended up where I am? Maybe not.

There wasn’t a part of the book that stuck out to me and that I enjoyed. A lot of the book ran together for me. On audio, it seemed like it wasn’t broken up by chapter or had any break between characters. It was seven hours of whining.

Clarissa was my least favorite of the narrators because she seemed the most self-absorbed and the most superficial. I could find moderately redeeming things in the other characters, but anything Clarissa talked about made me roll my eyes.

The audiobook I listened to was narrated by Juliet Stevenson. I don’t think Stevenson’s reading added anything to this book for me, but I don’t think it detracted from the book either. She seemed very whiny but the book called for that. My frustration was with the material so I won’t pretend that Stevenson had anything to do with how little I enjoyed this book.

If we’re all so obsessed with ourselves, we’ll never realize how much other people are obsessed with themselves. I struggle a bit with anxiety so as I write this, I feel hypocritical. As much as each character thought their problems were the biggest ones in the world and as much as they dwelt on their problems, other people had bigger issues and no one was helping anyone else. We’re all so obsessed with our own ‘dinner parties’ that we don’t stop and look around us and see other people struggling on their own with much bigger problems.

Writer’s Takeaway: Stream of consciousness is not something everyone enjoys but there are some people obsessed with this book. I, obviously, am not one of them. You’re never going to please every reader, so don’t try.

This was not a book for me and I don’t recommend it at all. Two out of Five stars.

This book fulfilled the 1920-1939 time period in my When Are You Reading? Challenge.

Until next time, write on.

You can follow me on Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. I’m available via email at SamAStevensWriter@gmail.com. And as always, feel free to leave a comment!

Related Posts:
Mrs Dalloway | The Novels of Virginia Woolf
The meaning of the omnibus in Mrs Dalloway | Blogging Woolf
Mrs Dalloway’s Party – Virginia Woolf (1973)  | Heavenali

WWW Wednesday, 25-January-2017

Welcome to WWW Wednesday! This meme was formerly hosted by MizB at A Daily Rhythm and revived here on Taking on a World of Words. Just answer the three questions below and leave a link to your post in the comments for others to look at. No blog? No problem! Just leave a comment with your responses. Please, take some time to visit the other participants and see what others are reading. So, let’s get to it!

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Note: For users of Blogspot blogs, I’m unable to comment on your posts as a WordPress blogger unless you’ve enabled Name/URL comments. This is a known WordPress/Blogspot issue. Please consider enabling this to participate more fully in the community.

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Currently reading: I’m on the last disk for World Without End by Ken Follett and I hope to wrap it up today or tomorrow. I’ll be sad when this one ends but it was a great ride and if there’s a third in this series, I’ll read it in a heartbeat.
I’m making steady progress with Misterio de la Guia de Ferrocarriles by Agatha Christie. Reading in another language puts me to bed really fast so I don’t get a ton of this read each night, but some. I’ll keep chipping away at it.
Again, nothing with Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs. I’ll have to wait until February when we have a few road trips planned. Sigh.
I started a new audiobook on my phone, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Maybe this is one not to listen to but I’m not enjoying it very much. It’s turned very inward and jumps around between the characters a lot which I wasn’t ready for and I’m having trouble following it.
I need a new ebook and decided to turn to The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. I have a lot of time to read at lunch this week so it will be nice to escape for a while. This book was really hot for a while but seems to have faded out a bit since then. I’m excited to pick it up and see what it’s all about!

Recently finished: I decided not to get out of bed on Saturday until I finished The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge. It didn’t take too long as most of the last 10% of the book was a biography of Bainbridge full of pictures. My review will be up tomorrow. As always, I enjoyed Bainbridge’s style but this time I had a slightly harder time following the characters than I have before.
I finished South of Broad by Pat Conroy on Thursday and absolutely loved it. My review went up on Monday so please check that out if you have the time. It was a great book. I gave it a full Five out of Five stars and I now want to go to Charleston.

Reading Next: I keep having to stop myself from grabbing Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling off my shelf. I will as soon as I finish Christie but not before then.

Shameless Plug: If you’re still looking for reading challenges in 2017, take a look at my historical fiction reading challenge, When Are You Reading? Let me know you’re interested and I’ll add you to the participant list. I had 13 people participate last year and I’d love to have a bigger group this year!

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Leave a comment with your link and a comment (if you’re so inclined). Take a look at the other participant links in the comments and look at what others are reading.

Have any opinions on these choices?

Until next time, write on.

You can follow me on Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. I’m available via email at SamAStevensWriter@gmail.com. And as always, feel free to leave a comment!

Recently Added to my To-Read Shelf

It’s been a while since I added an update to my To-Read shelf and I’ve added a full five books in the mean time!  So get ready to dive in.

1. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.   I added this after finishing Paula McClain’s book The Paris Wife.  The book sparked my curiosity in Hemingway which I had lost since high school.  I was a big fan of his prose then and I hope I still am!  The Sun Also Rises was written while Hemingway was married to his Paris Wife, Hadley Richardson.  The story follows a set of characters similar to Hemingway and his friends as ex-patriots in 1920s Paris to the bullfighting rings of Spain.  I’m only hoping it doesn’t read too much like The Paris Wife!
2. Finding Colin Firth by Mia March.  This is not my usual style of read and I even had Nicole comment that she thought it strange I wanted to read this.  I added it because a woman at my company mentioned she had read Dan Brown’s book Inferno as well as this one and much preferred March’s book.  As I enjoyed Inferno, I thought this might be worth an investigation.  The story focuses around three woman in a small town in Maine where Colin Firth is coming to film a new movie.  Each have their own motivation for being in town and they all discover something about themselves in the buzz of trying to find Colin Firth (you see what I did there?  Ha, I’m so funny).
3. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson.  I told my friend who recommended The Devil in the White City how much I had enjoyed it and he recommended another of Larson’s books, In the Garden of Beasts.  This history focuses on the American Ambassador to Germany after World War I whose family at first enjoy the energetic Germany army and determined Germanic attitude.  The family soon discovers the German prosecution of Jews and the true nature of the Third Reich.  I’m greatly looking forward to this book, assuming I ever get to it on my to-read list!
4. The Almond Tree by Michelle Cohen Corasanti.  I added this book because I won in it a Goodreads First Reads giveaway!  I never win anything so I was super excited to get this one.  The book sounds pretty interesting to boot!  It’s compared to The Kite Runner for it’s dramatics and it focuses on the Arab-Israeli conflict with a setting in Palestine.  This kind of a summary has me super excited to receive my first free book in the mail!
5. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.  After I posted my review of Elie Wiesel’s Night, my cousin suggested that I might like Mrs. Dalloway.  Always one to take a suggestion, I’ve added it onto the list!  It focuses on Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares to host a party in Inter-War Era England.  With shifts forward and backward in time, Woolf explores a woman’s life in that era.  (Geeking out right now, great suggestion, Nate!)

So there it is!  My new additions to the To-Read list.  Have you read any of them? What were your thoughts?  Do you have any suggestions for me?  I’ll be more than happy to add them.