Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I picked up Mrs. Dalloway because I enjoyed The Hours so much and wanted to see what I might have been missing in it by not being familiar with the original. I didn’t enjoy Mrs. Dalloway as much as I enjoyed The Hours but the relationship between the two was clear. It’s almost like The Hours was interpreting Mrs. Dalloway for me, which is helpful. Virginia Woolf isn’t always that easy to read. It’s a bit like reading poetry – sometimes I lose track of what we’re talking about. Each individual word is clear, the phrases almost clear, the sentences a little less so, and then the thought itself gets murky. I have to concentrate very hard to follow what Woolf is talking about in the larger sense.
So it’s not an easy read but a good one and although I don’t think it matters which order you read the two books in, reading them both makes you appreciate each one a little more.