Rating: 
Summary: Great book!
Review: After watching the movie, I enjoyed it so much that I had to read the book. I was not disappointed at all. Both the movie and the book are wonderful (of course with a few changes in the movie). I thought that Michael Cunningham did a great job of weaving the 3 stories together; it flowed nicely and wasn't confusing at all. Highly recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: Just too sad, and, sadly, real
Review: OK, I admit it, I've never read Mrs. Dalloway, and don't recall that I've ever read any V.Woolf. I'm sure there are many people who go through many days the way these three sad, beautiful women do, and I guess it's a testament to Mr. Cunningham's writing that he could show me this desolation, but it was hard work to keep picking up this book and live through this day with them. At times I thought the writing was just too self-conscious, too ornate; it distracted me from the story. Perhaps I'm just one of those meat-n-potatoes readers who likes story over style.
I did like the ending; gullible me, I was surprised. I gave it two stars instead of three to avoid being wishy-washy, and I give myself five for making it through to the end of the book! I would not recommend it to the depressed, or to anyone suffering from post-partum blues!
Rating:
Summary: Worthy of the Pulitzer
Review: I read this book and I haven't even seen the movie yet. The Hours depicts the lives of three women living in different time periods (Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarrisa). Their lives are interwoven by the use of Cummingham's great prose. The Hours paints a striking portrait of sexual ambiguity and depression, all traits that the three main characters share. I read this novel in one day and highly recommend it. I can't wait to see the movie.
Rating: 
Summary: Spend "Hours" in literary hell...
Review: Two words describe this book - pretentious drivel. Obviously this past Pulitzer winner got a book contract based on the award and not on the merit of this book. Save your time and money. If you like Virginia Woolf, buy a book by her, but not this sopping mess.
Rating:
Summary: On top of my list
Review: The Hours is brilliant. An accomplished, inspired work by an author who clearly knows and understands the delicate and, at many times, evasive art of writing. His prose is paced and purposed, his direction clear yet subtle and alluring. Whilst reading the book it was as though I had to take a mental deep breath every so often to allow for the absorbtion of the words and ideas he presents. His diction is intelligent without being pretentious and overly erudite, allowing the reader to maintain a constant engagement with the book. The story is on the surface rather simple yet it belies a deeper and more complex tone, a language of plot, sequence and circumstance that speaks to the truth of the novel. It could be quite easy to dismiss the purpose of using three female protagonists as an insight into the pained existance of feminine creativity and strained social placement. However, I think the book speaks to both women and men equally. It talks of the disjointed tandem between the inner and outer world of the human being and what it means to embrace oneself and all that one is in the face of dissent or discord. The movie was a welcome and deft accompaniment to the book. Seldom, in my opinion, does a movie do justice to its literary inspiration, yet the movie puts the essence of the novel in to another medium. This allows for further enjoyment for those who have read the book already, as well as providing a means to tap into the book for those who choose not to read it or simply prefer movies to books (although those who would see the film are not likely to be the type who do not read). Superlative and a must-read for anyone appreciative of English literature at its modern best.
Rating:
Summary: A Kaleidoscopic Tale
Review: This is the perfect book for lovers of Contemporary fiction.
A very deep and moving book with complex characters and situations, all of which the reader will be able to relate to in some form. Mr. Cunningham introduces us to the main characters in the book who are three women living in three different centuries. Virginia Woolfe, Karen Brown and Clarissa Dolloway's stories intertwine in such a smart unbelievable pattern that by the time you reach the end of the novel you will be opened-mouthed in wonderment and surprise. Virginia is a writer in the 1920's, suffering from a mental imbalance and putting together a book entitled:- Ms. Dolloway. Laura Brown is a Los Angeles housewife in the 1950's....a post World War 2 bride suffocating in her role as the good housewife and mother as she attempts to bake a cake for her husband's birthday that day. Clarissa Dolloway in the year 2002 is acting as hostess by planning a party for her ex lover who is dying with Aids and is about to receive one of the biggest Literary prizes for his latest work. Michael Cunningham latest accomplishment is laced with emotion. Rooted in these pages are emotions of despair, anguish, low self esteem, and suicidal thoughts amongst others. But little by little the reader will come to love all of those characters, and empathise with them for after all they are very much everyday people like you and me. A wonderful piece! A kaleidoscopic tale! A five star rating!
Rating: 
Summary: ...
Review: Brilliantly observant and beautifully written. So wonderfully captures the raw emotion and passion of everyday life.
Rating: 
Summary: Gloss masquerading as substance
Review: This book tells in alternate chapters the story of a day in the lives of three women at different times: writer Virginia Woolf struggling with her novel "Mrs. Dalloway" in 1923, unhappy wife Laura Brown clinging to sanity by reading that same novel around 1949, and Clarissa Vaughan, a New York book editor in the present who's throwing a party just like the fictional Mrs. Dalloway. Enough rave reviews have been written about this novel so that the whole world and its mother thinks it's magnificent. I think that the author's undeniable feel for significant, character-defining details may be here mistaken for profundity. The novel's main characters are all unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives but don't know why (except Woolf, who has a legitimate reason - she's gradually going mad). Clarissa is rich, as she tells you. She lives in an enviable apartment in a fashionable Manhattan neighborhood. She doesn't have a worry greater than the right choice of clothes or flowers. Laura and her husband own a new house and a convertible; she gets to stay home and bake cakes. Not bad for 1949. Virginia and her husband own a small printing company so she can publish her own books. Maybe a couple of weeks in a third world country would enlighten these women as to how privileged they are. They are not only self-important, self-absorbed and pathologically self-preoccupied but view the people outside their charmed circle with condescension and disdain. Clarissa walks the streets of New York noticing the ugliness and vulgarity of everyone, especially "foreign drivers who believe women should walk three paces behind their husbands." How sad that such lesser creatures must share the city with Clarissa and her elite crowd, people who buy $400 shirts without thinking twice and whose earth-shaking views and decisions deal mainly with where to dine and what party to attend. Woolf comes across as a snobbish prig, eyeing her servants with barely controlled disgust at their stupidity and commonness. She delights sadistically in giving them overly difficult, unnecessary tasks that are as humiliating as they are trivial. She sees her sister as insensitive and shallow. You feel that this Virginia is an insufferable snob, trapped in the suburbs (horror!), away from glamorous, intellectual London (where she rightfully belongs), lamenting that no one is clever or worthy enough to appreciate or understand her, the literary genius. What I find most distracting and indeed insufferably irritating about this book is the author's need to make practically every character in the story gay. Clarissa is gay and lives with Sally who is gay. So are all the people in New York, at least those whom Clarissa knows: Richard, the AIDS-afflicted former lover for whom she's throwing the party, is gay. Julia, her daughter by artificial insemination, is gay. Julia's older friend Mary, is gay. Louis, who was briefly Clarissa's lover (and then Richard's), is gay. Walter Hardy, a writer of homosexual potboilers, is gay. He takes care of Evan, who's gay. Oliver St. Ives, famous movie star, is gay. You get the idea... Those few characters who are not overtly gay have gay tendencies. That includes Virginia (whose entire gay reputation hinges on the fact that she slept twice with Vita Sackville-West and didn't like it). Laura has gay tendencies and her son Ritchie will grow up to be gay. Only her husband Dan is straight and that's because he has to be shown as everything Laura wants to get away from (although he's a good person). Eventually we expect homosexuality to be conferred on everything in the novel, including pets and inanimate objects. It's as if Victor Hugo had decided that every character in "Notre Dame de Paris" had to be a hunchback or if Tolstoy had made every person in "Anna Karenina" have a scandalous extramarital affair. Eventually it just gets too tedious. Mr. Cunningham (who I'm told is gay) appears to believe that the way to validate a character's lifestyle is to make everyone else in a story share the same inclinations. Strength does not lie in numbers but in the certainty and integrity of one's convictions. If you're a vegetarian you don't need to fantasize that everyone else is one in order to feel that you're doing the right thing. Furthermore, whereas the real Virginia Woolf wrote about affluent society whilst keeping a distance that allowed her to acutely question and criticize such a world (one of the things that make her a great writer), Mr. Cunningham is unable to keep any distance whatsoever from this insulated and privileged milieu because he thoroughly belongs to it and thus identifies with it. A glossy but ultimately shallow novel, and a narcissistic work for a narcissistic time.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting, beautiful work
Review: It may be true that not much "happens" in this book (as some have criticized) if what you are looking for are numerous plot twists or cliffhangers. This is not that type of novel. It traces a day in the life of three women in different time periods; each story is told separately and it is not clear at the outset how or if their stories are connected. Yet gradually it all comes together in Cunningham's elegant, beautifully crafted work. This is the type of book that creeps up on you. The observations are subtle yet deeply poignant. When I finished it, I wanted to read it again. I had been on a journey without knowing it; when I finally reached the destination, I wanted to take it again. This was clearly a labor of love for Cunningham. Few books in recent memory have moved me as The Hours did.
Rating:
Summary: tHE hOURS
Review: I've never read Virginia Wolfe so I went into this with no expectations. Here were my primary reactions: A bit too talky up to the third or fouth chapter. Amazing that a man did such a great job of speaking in a feminine voice. All characters were just a bit too outside the the norm, too extreme (except Clarissa) to really relate to them. The homosexuality theme was redundant and contrived and did nothing to drive plot. I especially liked the Laura Brown character whose visions were so intense it seemed her brain would burst. The book was a very worthwhile experience although I found myself in a state of depression while reading it. The author did a great job on a complicated structure. I would recommend it.
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