Besides the writing guidelines handed down by my therapist, I was also given a reading list. All the books on the reading list were chosen by my therapist because they were written by authors who experienced great pain or sadness in their lives. There was no requirement that I even read any of them, but it helped that a lot of them were either books I wanted to read or by authors that I wanted to explore.
So far off the list I posted, I had previously read “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and “The Liars Club,” but both are books I wouldn’t mind revisiting. My friend Caroline sent me “Bastard Out of Carolina” as an e-Book and I devoured it in a single night. Jenna scanned “The Yellow Wallpaper” for me out of a course reader she had. I read it as soon as I received it. Many others are books people are either looking for or are available at libraries that are sadly nowhere near me.
But above all the rest there is one book that stands out. Within two days of having posted my reading list in “...Not Because You Have To” I received six emails and one comment from people saying they had a copy of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” and every single one of them asked (in some way or another) why I would want to put myself through that. I told Caroline it was part of my therapy to which she replied that reading “To the Lighthouse” was anything but therapy.
I persisted mostly because I had a genuine interest in Virginia Woolf as a person. Her life has been written about in such great detail, but I really wanted to know what her own writing was like.
Caroline sent me part of the book by request after I had finished “Bastard Out of Carolina.” With it came this email:
“This is only the first hundred pages. If you survive, and you want them, there is another 142 after it. If not, I am deleting this from my computer because I have no use for it anymore. Also, what should I send in lieu of flowers?”
I scoffed and dove right in. I made it to page 19 before I threw in the towel and decided to watch professional wrestling to help get the stench of failure off of me.
Never before had I read something that I considered to be above my reading level and this was no exception. In high school I read the unabridged version of “Moby Dick” for fun. But only two chapters into “To the Lighthouse” I felt as lost as a newborn playing “Guitar Hero” on expert.
Woolf’s language is somewhat dated, but such language never stopped me from reading something before. It is also a testament to the woman herself that she was so prolific in the relatively short time she was alive. I admire her accomplishments however posthumous they may be, and I am willing to read some of her later non-fiction work.
But I have to admit that everyone who responded to me was right. This is a terrible fucking book.
A lot of the problem with what I was able to read was that Woolf’s writing style is so sloppy that it is virtually incoherent: Sentences go on needlessly for entire pages while some paragraphs are made up of only fragments of a few words each. I could follow what she was saying, but the writing physically gave me a headache.
Hence, why I want to try reading her nonfiction. The way I see it, if there is no plot to follow I can just shut my brain off and pretend I am reading someone’s notebook if the writing is bad. Right?..... Right?
There is no real point to this entry except to apologize to those I doubted. I am Really Fucking Sorry.
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