Rating: 
Summary: MST3K worthy...
Review: If they were to make a print version of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, this book would be a worthy candidate. This book was terribly bad, with absolutely no plot. I have no problem with there being no plot, but there is no real insight into the characters either. It consists of pointless musings on nothing that is really worth musing on. This is something that should be left on the shelf. When you come down to it, there is nothing in this book that makes it worth reading. Nothing happens to the characters. There is on point to page upon page of dribble discussing the events. A book without a story or characters is just words, and that's all this is.
Rating: 
Summary: Difficult to rate
Review: This book is one of the hardest I've tried to rate. The ending with its multiple perspectives - those on the boat, and those on the shore - is wonderful, and with just the right mix of the visionary. It's almost a ghost story, but nothing like any other ghost story I've read.No matter where I picked the book up, and took up reading again, I was fascinated. I could feel the holiday the characters were experiencing as if I was there at the seaside even though I have only had one short holiday in Britain. But, then, I suspect that family life and the desultory holiday experience was very similar here in Australia. I don't really mean desultory, but the routine holiday venue with its hours of no-work, no-school often had a strange feeling of tedium mixed with the 'excitement' of something different from routine. Unfortunately, reading this book also resurrected the feeling in me - the book too well records the feeling, and I quickly found myself drifting off into my own private world and not regarding the words as well as I should - only to be fascinated again as my attention snapped back. The book is wonderful for its multiple perspectives. Here is an example of a change of view mid-paragraph (this sort of thing often had me re-reading as my attenton drifted). "What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his plate, which he had swept clean, as if Lily thought (he sat opposite her with his back to the window precisely in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure of his meals. Everything about him had that meagre fixity, that bare unloveliness. But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike any one if one looked at them. She liked his eyes: they were blue, deep set, frightening." The stream-of-consciousness writing style used by Woolf as closely as anything I have experienced imitates the greatest attribute of fine music - counterpoint - the ability of the mind to track and appreciate many strands of experience at the one time, to flick back and forth between many voices. With music you can listen to the same work many times and explore the multiple voices in different ways each time without compromising your appreciation of the whole. I suspect you could do this with several readings of 'To the Lighthouse' too. Unfortunately it takes a greater commitment to re-read a book than it does to, say, listen again to a Mozart symphony. Woolf does have a great ending to this novel - a really memorable mood piece. Unfortunately, to extend the musical analogy, I found her melodies not strong enough, the development of ideas at times pedestrian (detail got in the way), the orchestration inadquate and the harmony not strong enough (although there is one very strong moment in the novel).
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but tough to understand
Review: I thought that this book was incredibly well written, but while i thought that it was well done, and it was certainly reflective of the time in which it was supposed to represent, I thought that it was very difficult to understand. I found myself re-reading passages over and over again, just to get the meaning that Woolf was trying to convey. I thought that the author was trying to express a stoic look at the snobbishness of the Victorian era. While Mrs. Ramsay is the guiding light in the entire book, I thought that she was also the one that really made it difficult to understand. I also thought that Mrs. Ramsay was the one that referred to the lighthouse the most. I recognized the lighthouse as a symbol for the goals that everyone that was vacationing there had, but also for everyone that was visiting the Ramsays. Also, reflective of the era, is the way that Mrs. Ramsay looked at love. She liked the concept of being in love, but she didnt nessacarily love who she was married to. Or rather, she did, but she chose to question it. I am still not sure what the whole deal is with the Ramsay adults. The Ramsay children, however, are the idealistic symbols for the future--they symbolize the promise of what is possible to come for the family and the rest of the world.They thought taht the lighthouse was the answer to all of their problems--and in reality, it was the creator of most of them. And, of course, while the Ramsays were a huge part of the story, Lily Briscoe and Charles Tansley were the two characters that epitomized the entire theme of the novel. They are the abstract, just like Lily's paintings, and they are the ones that really understand the world and what is going on. They are the ones that will still survive when the society that everyone knows crumbles to the ground. All in all, I thought that this novel was well written, but I thought that Woolf could have explained things a little better.
Rating: 
Summary: Challenging but edifying
Review: "To the Lighthouse" reads like a dream. By that, I mean Woolf's writing has a dreamlike, impressionistic quality that uses little dialogue. The novel is about several English people who spend their summers in the Hebrides, islands northwest of Scotland. The lighthouse mentioned in the title is located on one of the islands and symbolizes a goal or an ideal to which several of the characters aspire in one way or another. The most prominent characters are the Ramsay family, whose internal conflicts form the basis for their existence, much like any other nuclear family. Mr. Ramsay is a philosophy professor, an imperious man who dreams of being remembered for his work and enjoys laying down the law with his children. Mrs. Ramsay's love for her husband has dwindled to the point of her not being sure why she ever fell in love with him in the first place, but she is enamored with the *idea* of being in love, always looking forward to her single friends getting married. The central character, however, is a woman named Lily Briscoe who paints canvases of an apparently abstract nature. Her conflict appears in the form of a character named Charles Tansley, an unsociable chauvinist who admonishes her that "women can't paint, women can't write." Lily Briscoe's efforts to paint represent the difficult, introspective process of artistic creation. In combining the themes represented by Lily and the Ramsays, Woolf portrays the problems of being a woman artist in a society that discouraged women to be artistic or creative (the discouragement represented by the voice of Tansley) and therefore having to deal with the disappointment and frustration of conflicting with social mores (illustrated by Mrs. Ramsay's discontent in her marriage). However, Lily triumphs in completing her painting at the end, as Woolf triumphs in completing her novel.
Rating:
Summary: Painting With Words-she was a genius
Review: I loved this book. I would not have liked it as much when I was younger, under 40, that is. I would recommend all read The Hours by Michael Cunningham and look for the movie that is being made of it. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It is mostly "about" Virginia Woolf. HJK
Rating:
Summary: The Final Nail in Victoria's Coffin
Review: Virginia Woolf's novel "To The Lighthouse," is, as its title suggests, a multivoiced final journey from the 19th century into the 20th. What must be determined over the course of reading the novel and reflecting on it, is the function of the lighthouse. Are its probing, distant lights supposed to be a beacon of hope as its characters move from the repressive age of Victoria into the liberating age of technology? Does the lighthouse echo the arch of experience which Tennyson's Ulysses claims 'fades forever and forever when I move' toward it? Or is the lighthouse just a lighthouse? Mrs. Ramsay, the novel's main character and guiding principle, is herself a lighthouse, built on a foundation of tradition and stock 19th century notions of how people should interact in society and towards each other. Her matchmaking schemes are ever fainter echoes of the Victorian novel's marriage plots. Woolf undermines and qualifies Mrs. Ramsay's intentions by exploding the conventions of the 19th century novel - plot structure becomes amorphous, protean formlessness; narrative voice is shared between characters as narration becomes thought and smoothly passes from character to character, anticipating the stream of consciousness style. Woolf also questions Mrs. Ramsay's social priorities - is marriage really a vital or necessary condition for women? Through close examination of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's marriage, Lily Briscoe's determination to remain single, and the novel's myriad other relationships, Woolf severely problematizes any comfortable ideas about knowing other people. Another important issue is the social value of art - Frequent conversations involving the philosopher Mr. Ramsay, the doctoral student Charles Tansley, the poet Augustus Carmichael, and the painter Lily Briscoe, along with Woolf's own speculations on the permanence of human design in Part II ask us to consider the role of art in regard to humanity. In a novel where the boundaries of time and space are consistently challenged, and the family unit is exposed, one must also focus on the erotics of storytelling. Love, hatred, admiration, and disgust permeate "To The Lighthouse." Our attempt as readers to understand the drive of the novel compels us to seek a reason for reading it among these four potential narrative scenarios. Does love, hate, or some combination of the two commit the characters to reveal their thoughts, and why do these thoughts involve us so that we feel a need to read to the end? "To The Lighthouse" is a fascinating book - coming on the heels of such anti-Victorian masterpieces as Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" and Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh," Woolf's novel through form and content seeks to put the 19th century to rest, while simultaneously dealing with the terrors of post-World War I existence. Concentrate and give Woolf your undivided attention. This novel deserves it.
Rating:
Summary: Ed Harris says!
Review: The February 19, 2001 issue of Time magazine's trend alert section asks actor Ed Harris what some of his favorite things are. When it came to his favorite book Harris says about Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse "The first book I've ever read where the writing took my breath away."
Rating:
Summary: Bumblin', stumblin', fumblin'.
Review: I see Woolf's point. I understand what she was doing and saying. But it was poorly executed. Every bit of it from beginning to end. She can't hold a single thought or development for long enough to make me care about anything. The writing seems to have been a toy for the writer, and not at all a serious attempt at a novel. As another reviewer stated, Woolf does give us a few glances at some great phrasings and story possibilities, but then she stamps it all out and moves on to something, anything, else. Just so long as the story never becomes interesting. God forbid.
Rating:
Summary: Yawwwwwwwwwwwwwwn.
Review: "To the Lighthouse" is a rambling monotony, a lifeless droning. No matter how loudly the literary lemmings scream, that will always be so. Woolf opens "To the Lighthouse" with a very uninteresting sentence and a "So what" bit of exposition; both come to nothing, promising us little and failing to deliver even that. The story was rambling, incoherent and boring in the extreme. Woolf jumped from head to head, thought to thought, as if each threatened to bite off her foot as she landed. The "story" (and calling "To the Lighthouse" a story is a huge generosity) is painfully slow. So slow, in fact, that you come to "The End" and still nothing has developed. The book is filled with poorly written exposition that not only stops the story dead, but takes us completely away from it time and again. Each sentence starts with a jerk, wanders around, twists back upon itself, spirals away from us, then trips its way back to the starting point. Woolf seemed to have no idea about what it was that she really wanted to say and no ability to state any of it succinctly or coherently. Continuing in this trend, Woolf keeps the dialogue brief in the extreme and does it for no other reason than for her to run on and on and on and . . . with her exposition, using those miles long sentences that the reader is PRAYING will end, but that just keep muddling along, belaboring point after senseless point. The poor woman had no talent at all when it came to simply telling a straightforward tale and making it interesting to anyone but herself. Little of the book has anything to do with the lighthouse, or with going there. It's more about the inner workings and complexities of a small group of people. Kind of like taking a series of snapshots of the group, then going one by one and telling what is in each of their heads. As we go through the various bits of these snapshots, now and then Woolf tosses out the seeds of something interesting, then immediately stamps the life out of them before they can sprout into something greater. Included in these are some tantalizing crumbs of internal monologue, but Woolf can't even stay focused on that. She wonders through each character's personal musings just the same way that she wonders through the main story, never allowing one thought to fully form before rambling away from it. This is the story's real tragedy, because she turns some marvelous phrases, but loses them in the tale's incoherence. The shrieking chant of "but it's EXPERIMENTAL fiction!" cannot excuse the many and severe shortcomings. Bad writing is bad writing, no matter what feeble attempts at justification are made to hide that fact.
Rating:
Summary: A great book which I had to think about
Review: When I first began reading this book I did not realize that it was stream of consciousness book and was worried that it might turn out to be another "The Sound and The Fury" of which I could not get past the first section. How wrong I was. From the very begining, after the initial surprise, I was enthralled by this book. The wonderful point of this book is the characters and how the book flows. I was never bored reading the book and constantly found myself wanting to read to the next chapter. Also, I find myself liking it better now that I think about it more and really look forward to reading it again. Please get this book, you will not regret it.
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