you decide, /lit/

>>8440935
I was trying to figure out this image for too long

>>8440935
Haven't read The Waves. To The Lighthouse is brilliant, and was my first Woolf. I enjoyed it more the second time I read it; it yields more meaning by rereadings.

Most people recomend you start with Mrs Dalloway, but if I'd done that I would never have read another page of Woolf. Fucking hated that book. But I'm in the minority there.

>>8440952
Describe To the Lighthouse to me anon, and forget what people sually recommend. Only two options here.

>>8440950
I love it. It has a composition reminiscent of some of the most expressive paintings to boot

yeah, not even gonna save that image onto my computer.

>>8440952
>it yields more meaning by rereadings
doesnt everything

>>8441011
Why?

>>8441040
Man, if the authorities ever come and try to dig through my stuff, I don't want that sort of shit on there. The authorities are already breathing down my neck right now, this fucking detective keeps coming around to my house asking if I could suck his faggot dick.

>>8441046
Look again friend. You're missing something.

>>8441057
Yeah I know the picture isn't actual child porn lol. I'm just saying, they'd get upset over anything, they're fucking nazis. Someone contacted the authorities on me over something I said on facebook which sounded like I was threatening to shoot some people, when all I said is that school shootings are great because school is bullshit or something. That's the effect of what I said, wasn't even making a threat and someone called the authorities on me. Now I'm on their list, and they came and asked me a bunch of questions the other day because I fit the description of someone else who committed a crime who matched my description. The cop's a fucking faggot, he just wants my dick.

>>8440967
Well, it is a difficult book, even though it isn't particularly famous for its difficulty (like say Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow). Its chronology and structure is fucked which means you'll expend a bit of effort to sort through it

I don't think I've ever read another book that's so internal; what I mean is that Woolf rareely takes us outside the heads of the characters. It simply cycles around the characters, describing their thoughts and feelings (some have said imitating the lighthouse beam).

Its essentially a novel about order and the decay thereof, played out within a family. If the idea of broken or dysfunctional family interests you, TTL deals with the subject subtly and differently from any other novel. It's tragedy played out in the most tragic arena: family, specifically disintegrating, doomed family, serving as a microcosm of the loss of stability (which Woolf portrays both as liberating and damning) following the first world war.

Her prose is great, especially in the novel's middle section, basically an extended prose poem, again describing decay and entropy.

But where Woolf, to me, really shines is characterization. She understands both that people exist in relation to each other (the charcters are not wrapped in their own psyches at all and engage very much with the other characters, worrying abou the impression they make, forming impressions of them) and also the irony that, despite this inherent social yearning to have a closer, more intimate understanding of others, we are ultimately forever seperated from others.

I really fucking love this book (which is maybe why Mrs Dalloway was so disappointing to me). It's a really beautifully elegiac portrayal of social and family relationships, and comes the closest to capturing the mood of ancient greek tragedy of anything I've read outside of those plays themselves.

>>8441023
To an extent. But this is markedly truer for some book than others. High modernist stuff tends to benefit from rereadings more than say russian realists, simply because these novels are structurally and ideologically designed to resist straightforward interpretations. I was just pointing this out because my appreciation for the book increased greatly rereading it.

>>8441062
I find Gravity's Rainbow easy to be honest. Ulysses is hard indeed.
I like what you wrote anon. I like it a lot and the topic is extremely interesting to me.
Thank you for such a nice answer.

>>8441062
Also, does anyone want to make a case for The Waves, since I haven't read it and so can't comment

Or does anyone want to explain the appeal of Mrs Dalloway? It's strange because all of the other people I've met who hated that book hate Woolf generally but To The Lighthouse is one of my favourite novels

skim The Waves then read the far superior Wavves

>>8441086
If you find Gravity's Rainbow easy then To The Lighthouse won't seem difficult to you at all. It's nowhere near as structurally complex as Gravity's Rainbow. And it's stream-of-conciousness (if you even want to call it that) isnt the fragmented Joycean kind, but fairly straightforwardly descriptive.

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>>8441105
That's good news anon. Have a Schopy meme.

>>8441117
Thanks mang, just what I was looking for

>>8441095
>does anyone want to explain the appeal of Mrs Dalloway?
It's the only Woolf I've read and it immediately became the best novel I've read this year.
Bear in mind that it has virtually no plot, the least of any book I've ever read. Mrs. Dalloway throws a dinner party, that's it. The other ~200 pages follow her and her friends as they go about their day socializing, running errands, and getting ready for the party, having existential crises, and contemplating suicide. She really digs into the psychology of her characters and themes of existentialism and solitude. It's very easy to dislike this book if the themes and characters do not resonate with you.
Nothing really happens but it still moved my like no other book and made me feel oddly melancholic. I felt disarmed by her insight but not threatened.

>>8441150
Its odd because a lot of what you found in Mrs Dalloway is the stuff I really loved in To The Lighthouse (which I'd recommend to you; what you describe in Mrs Dalloway is there tenfold). But, like you say, it just didn't resonate with me. I really wish it did, because I don't think its a badly written book by any means; just the characters turned me off I guess

>>8441061
That picture isn't going to somehow make matters worse when they cops find the -actual- CP on your computer.
And don't pretend you haven't got any, we're on 4chan.

>>8440935
Legitimately thought that was someone exposing their asshole over a baby.

>>8440950
Imagine being the baby. And do the parents show this embarrassing photo to the kids gf?

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Fucking baby is getting all the attention. Someone talk about The Waves.

i literally have no idea what is going on in that picture

>>8441578
>>8440935
what am i looking at here?

>>8441894
wow i just realized. its a dad kissing a baby. his heads on the left

>>8441896
I see it now dude, mind blown. I thought it was some kind of weird photoshop.