To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

I'm going to start off by saying that I really wanted to like this book. I had every intention of enjoying it. However, no matter how hard I tried, I continuously failed. At first I believed it is mostly due to the writing style of the author that turned me off, but upon finishing the book I realized that there was really very little about it that I did like.

The book starts off normal, a young boy wanting to visit the Lighthouse with his mother, who is trying to have optimism that the weather will clear up by the morning, and his father adamantly contradicting the mother. However, after this initial chapter, I became lost and confused. We meet some other characters, many other characters actually, none of whom we get to know very well. There is a Chinese girl who we cannot forget is of Asian decent since the author always refers to her Chinese eyes, yellow skin, and black hair. It an older book, so in the days it was written perhaps this was considered admissible at the time, but I found this to be completely unnecessary.

The first half of the book goes into great detail of one evening of this family's lives. Some kids go to the beach. The father sits on the porch with a friend smoking a pipe. The mother knits socks while the son cuts pictures out of a magazine. The Chinese girl paints and has an intellectual conversation with a family friend. The family gathers around for dinner and then they all head to bed.

The next few chapters introduce some unfamiliar and unimportant characters, and they also pass an uncertain amount of time during which 3 of the main characters have uneventful deaths. After the deaths the previous characters (well, some of them) regather for no apparent reason and we get another simple description of their day, and that's the end. There's no plot, no description of time passed, and no protagonist, antagonist, or climax (which I always thought were necessary to any novel).

There were some fun moments in this, but the book only gets ONE OUT OF FIVE STARS. I am still trying to decide why this was on the list to begin with. Perhaps it has to do with the deep meaning behind the book, but I had trouble catching that also. It didn't help that the used copy I read was marked and highlighted all over the place (I hate highlighting)

Reading next:: The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne