Rating: 
Summary: 'The Hours'
Review: What an amazing book. I bought this book a year ago and hadn't read it yet. Anyway, I was going through some boxes of stuff early this morning and I found this book. I knew that I wanted to read the book before I saw the movie in theatres so I started reading it around 10 this morning. With breaks in between, I finished it around 5:30 this afternoon. I've never NEVER read a book in one day, let alone in one weekend before. This is the most clearly descriptive, deeply moving, interesting, and wonderfully written book I have ever read. I CANNOT WAIT to watch the movie. You should definitely read this.
Rating: 
Summary: More Like Days...
Review: Or weeks, or even YEARS. This was the longest and most boring thing I have read since anything ever. I do not reccomend this book. Resist the hype.
Rating:
Summary: a simple choice!
Review: Cunningham is amazing. In The Hours, he makes life or death such a simple choice. The way he carefully weaves together the lives of the three women is lovely. I find also very interesting that he can capture the lives of women struggling with depression so passionately. I felt very exhilarated when I finished this book, I felt like life was a very simple choice to make. I would recommend that people read this before seeing the movie. However, if you have seen the movie already, then I would still recommend reading this, to see if your feelings changed about the story. I found, that both mediums can be appreciated equally but with different perspectives.
Rating:
Summary: Rich, riveting novel
Review: The film version of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Hours" has just garnered nine Academy Award nominations. I have yet to see the movie, but if it has stayed true to this book, I think it has more than a chance to take home Best Picture honors.
I'm sure the movie trailers have already mapped out that this is a story of three women from different time periods who are connected somehow. This connection is the heart of the story, and the promise of discovering it is what keeps you reading.
The storytelling is descriptive, which is not everybody's cup of tea. But Cunningham uses subtlety to build the plot, sneaking in points here and there just to make sure you are paying attention. It all comes together brilliantly, but uniquely. Some authors tend to throw a twist at readers, shocking them. Cunningham folds in the connection in such a way that you should have known it all along. And I'm NOT talking about the fact that all of the ladies link to Virginia Woolf.
This book is wonderful, touching prose. It is also very methodically put-together. For example, Cunningham's story alternates between time periods. For Virginia Woolf's time period, his writing takes a classical turn (in other words, illustrative and fancy). For Laura Brown's part of the story, his writing is more conservative and simple, much like the era of post-World War II itself. Finally, for Clarissa's tale, he chooses a more modern style reflected in many of today's novels, resembling everyday speech.
"The Hours" is a refreshing addition to modern literature and truly deserving of its praise. If the Hollywood version sells more copies of the novel, then that's great. More people will discover why this one is destined to become a classic.
Rating:
Summary: Too good to miss
Review: This is truly a GREA£Ôpiece of literature. Michael Cunningham is suprisingly detail in his description of every object, action, and thought. Half way through this book and i said to myself, "Wow, so this is what a Pulitzer Price winner reads like." And what suprised me the most was how easily readable this book was. This book didn't need esoteric language to be great. It is great. It would be a shame for anyone to miss this book.
Rating: 
Summary: three women's lives delicately connected.....
Review: The Hours is a novel about three women who lives have a common thread. That thread is the novel Mrs. Dalloway. One women is Virginia Woolf, the author of Mrs. Dalloway. Her story seems very loosely based (with much literary license) on the facts of Virginia Woolf's life. Then there is Clarissa Vaughan, a modern version of Mrs. Dalloway, who is nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by a friend of hers at a young age. Like the Woolf character of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan is also preparing to give a party. The third woman is Mrs. Brown, who is coping with her life as best she can, as she reads the novel, Mrs. Dalloway in her spare and stolen moments. This is a story that seems to dance between these three women, with the novel as the dance partner they all share at different moments. I read this two years ago and totally disliked it. This time I read Mrs. Dalloway first to try to gain an understanding of the style and meaning of this connecting link. I really gained a new appreciation for this novel and the gentle intertwining of the lives of these three women that Michael Cunningham has crafted in the intricate style of Virginia Woolf's writings. The delicate link between these women is more than just depression and a novel named Mrs. Dalloway. This is an amazing novel that is crafted of intricate layers that, in the final chapters, gently unwrap themselves to reveal the real person that intimately joins these three women together.
Rating:
Summary: not too contrived
Review: This is a great book.
In response to the "too contrived" reviewer who said this: "I don't think you can "cover" literature in the same way you can cover a song." What about Shakespeare? A lot of his works were "covers."
Rating:
Summary: Death's beautiful disguise
Review: Whenever someone starts making a point of telling me, or whoever might be listening, that the world is a great place, that it's a beautiful day, that life is really worth living, I can't help but suspect that this someone is suffering a mild or moderate form of depression. There is something desperate about such profuse positive declarations - why, after all, need such sentiments be expressed unless there was some doubt about them. Whatever its virtues, 'The Hours' suffers from a spirit sodden with such tendentious declarations. Its redemptive moments of happiness consequently fail to ring true.
*
Virtually all the characters share an underlying cattiness, which I found surprising and disappointing. This similarity might have been intentional, straining to embody the emotional milieu of Bloomsbury as imagined by Cunningham, and to provide an emotional link between the three strands of story, but it also selects and emphasises a superficial level in the characters' emotional spectra, a level that, for me, was off-putting and, given its repeated emphasis, undermined any conviction in the characters' capacities to experience deeper emotions.
*
There is a notable absence of powerful negative emotions. Nobody hates. Jealousy is tempered and compromised. Yet death, specifically suicide, is central to the book's concerns. For me, the deaths are robbed of their seriousness, of their tragedy, and, frankly, of their reality, in that they do not emerge from an emotional world where the dark aspects of human nature are acknowledged and made palpable. The cattiness mentioned previously is allied with a superficial aesthetic preoccupation that polishes the surface of the prose, and of the characters' interactions. The suicides are in danger of being seen as almost aesthetic gestures - like blemishes upon the tidy lives and tidy passions portrayed in the book. There is something deeply unsatisfying about this. These are people stalked by madness, decay and impending death, and who have complex and fraught emotional attachments, yet beautiful prose and beautiful flowers are offered as sublimations of this.
*
While the above reservations prevent me from accepting 'The Hours' as 'profound', the lavishness of the prose, its unabashed sensuality, the willingness to celebrate an agonistic relationship with an established great author, all this is exciting, and a potent antidote for so much narrative writing that finds its inspiration in disingenuously objective journalism. Perhaps the disguise it offers to troubling emotions and death is what most of us need, at least some of the time.
Rating:
Summary: A National Treasure
Review: Cunningham's construction is so flawless and his writing so exquisite that the Pulitzer seemed like a forgone conclusion. The weaving of past and present, story and mood, desolation and the joy of choosing life are all part of what I think is a masterpiece. An afterthought - I saw the movie expecting to be disappointed and instead was left speechless with its beauty and depth. Cunningham must be thrilled.
Rating:
Summary: Resonates Long After the Last Page
Review: Don't miss the book, even if you catch the movie. The final thread connecting Virginia Woolf, the New York Mrs. Dalloway, and Laura Brown arrives with considerable affection and subtlety. The writing throughout is spare, precise, sympathetic and true. The novel, far more than the movie, delivers on the title: every single human battles depression and loss, but there are those Hours, when life is suddenly all that we think it should be always. They come unexpectedly, often unrecognized but we stay alive for them, alert for them, even when it seems impossible that any one will ever come again. Highly praised novels often disappoint me when I finally get around to reading them. This one did not, but understand that conventional action and plot development are conspicuous by their absence.
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