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A review by rutajwaha
The Common Reader: Vol. I by Virginia Woolf
4.0
The common reader... differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.
Virginia Woolf. The Common Reader: First Series
I too am a common reader and I felt in great company with her when reading this. Her hunger for books is not much unfamiliar to mine, and as far as reading is concerned this felt like a conversation with myself about my relationship with the books I own, have read, have abandoned, inherited, borrowed or forgotten.
The Common Reader is a slim collection of 18 essays about her lifelong affair with books. While some essays went over my head, her take on writers and subjects I'm familiar with was really thrilling. I enjoyed her pieces on Montaigne, Austen and the Brontë's in particular, also her writing on literary criticism and contemporary art really interested and it felt just as relevant and insightful now as it must have been at the time. She is as sharp and illuminating as always.
Virginia Woolf. The Common Reader: First Series
I too am a common reader and I felt in great company with her when reading this. Her hunger for books is not much unfamiliar to mine, and as far as reading is concerned this felt like a conversation with myself about my relationship with the books I own, have read, have abandoned, inherited, borrowed or forgotten.
The Common Reader is a slim collection of 18 essays about her lifelong affair with books. While some essays went over my head, her take on writers and subjects I'm familiar with was really thrilling. I enjoyed her pieces on Montaigne, Austen and the Brontë's in particular, also her writing on literary criticism and contemporary art really interested and it felt just as relevant and insightful now as it must have been at the time. She is as sharp and illuminating as always.