The Hours: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics Book 1)

Probably THE most boring pretentious book I have ever read! It rambled on incessantly until I wanted to scream "get to the point!". And that was just in the first five chapters .Oh, I understood what it was about, but it wasn't worth the extensive effort I put into reading this dull book.Want a really great book to read, War and Peace.

THE HOURSAudio, 1 hr 52 minsBBC Radio full cast dramatisationThis is one of my favorite books. I was delighted when it was adapted for the screen, and enjoyed the multi-award-winning 2002 movie starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. The film received an Academy Award (Best Actress, Kidman), two Golden Globe Awards (Best Picture and Best Actress, Kidman), two BAFTA Awards (Best Film Music and Best Actress, Kidman), and many more accolades. So I had high expectations for this full-cast recording.This BBC Radio version is an enjoyable listen with a talented voice cast, particularly Rosamund Pike as Clarissa. The distinctions between voices and shifts between timelines are easy to follow. I do recommend this title, and it is a thoughtful drama about three women in three very different times, linked by a beautiful book (MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf).However…"UNABRIDGED?" NO.Audible has this labeled "Unabridged" and it is SO very abridged that much of the dialogue does not appear in Mr Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning book.Examples:The audio begins with a breathy, musing Virginia: "Hmm. Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway. What does she say? Something. What? Hmm. I might start there. Mrs Dalloway, going on an errand, in June. I might start there. Mrs. Dalloway, going on an errand, on a day in June.Instead of the soldiers marching off to lay the wreath in Whitehall. Is it the right beginning? Is it too ordinary? Mrs. Dalloway said … something. Yes. Hmm."However, Mr. Cunnigham's text begins: "Prologue. She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa."For the relevant section of the book (Virginia's musing about how to begin her book), one must turn to page 29 where the text reads: "Mrs. Dalloway said something (what?), and got the flowers herself. It is a suburb of London. It is 1923. Virginia awakens. This might be another way to begin, certainly; with Clarissa going on an errand on a day in June, instead of soldiers marching off to lay the wreath in Whitehall. But is it the right beginning? Is it a little too ordinary? Virginia lies quietly in her bed, and sleep takes her again so quickly she is not conscious of falling back to sleep at all."(Page 29, Picador Modern Classics edition, Kindle)This radio version is an excellent way to become acquainted with the story, but it is absolutely not an "Unabridged" recording. This version loses so much of the cerebral nature of the book that it could at best be called an adaptation, and I would go so far as to call it "inspired by" the modern-classic novel THE HOURS. If you enjoy this story, read the book!

Genius. Sheer genius. Based on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," this book by Michael Cunningham takes the barest outline of that British classic and twists it. And twists it again. And again. It follows a day in the life of Clarissa as she prepares to host a party for her dear friend, Richard, who is dying of AIDS and will receive a literary award for his poetry that evening. But it also follows an imaginary day in the life of Virginia Woolf as she writes "Mrs. Dalloway," as well as a day in the life of an American housewife, Mrs. Brown, in the late 1940s. The stories of Clarissa and Mrs. Brown are tragically joined at the end of the book. I highly advise you to either read Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" first or concurrently (as I did) to fully appreciate the many ways the two books intersect.

This remains one of the books im always recommending.How can someone keep living a life that's not their own, just to make people happy? They keep thinking life is good because making people happy makes them happy but the point where they reach the understanding that their life is not their own, it is heartbreaking but it lights the hope of life. No one can know what happens in other shoes unless you walk with them, and the motives and actions of some people may seem awful but for others might be the light of life illuminating everything.Live the moment, your moment.

That about sums it up. The long paragraphs veering off into no-man's land was hard to follow. I'd seen the movie and loved it, but this was very hard to read. I made myself finish it, but was disappointed I did. It almost felt like there was this fog over the book. All the characters had almost no "major" response to anything happening to them. Even the tragic end was kinda this dreamy state where nobody really mourned or anything. Not my cup of tea. Watch the movie with Meryl & Ed Harris. Brilliant.

Every action every deed overly described in this book. Reading this I feel as if I was expected to admire and revere its wordy cleverness. One protagonist couldn't even walk into her kitchen without dreadful, limp, pros ensuing. Making a cake with her young son turned into arty drama! If this author had gone on any longer about the damned cake I would have screamed. Poor Nellie being sent up to London from Richmond for sugared ginger for the tea she was trying to prepare for Virginia Woolf's sister and family, ordinary sugar just not good enough! Virginia Woolf dreadful snob of a woman. I never liked her after reading that she was against (along with several of her Bloomsbury Set pals) free education for the masses. She felt we might use it wrongly if we were all educated like the upper classes. Needless to say I disliked this book wholeheartedly. I would never have chosen to read it if it hadn't been a book club book not my type of book at all. It didn't help either that I was reading it with a broken leg and sprained ankle throbbing in the background!

Cunningham has forged a masterful novel which melds ideas of creativity, failure, love, suicide, depression and gender, and has done so in a manner that manages to be profoundly moving in just a little over 200 pages.The engagement with Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is creative and penetrating: in the three narratives nestled here, Virginia Woolf is wrestling with what she wants her book, originally called ‘The Hours’, to be; Clarissa, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway, in late C20th New York experiences much that Woolf’s own character does in that single day that encompasses both love and death; and Laura Brown in 1950s America is struggling to find the time to read ‘Mrs Dalloway’ amidst her humdrum domesticity – while also pulling the whole book together beautifully by the end.While, strictly speaking, it’s possible to read this without knowing ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (it’s clever that Laura is reading the book so that pertinent quotations can be inserted within this text), there are so many pleasures to be found in tracing connections and marvelling at how deftly Cunningham has both reproduced key moments and given them a modern contemporaneity.Ultimately, this is a book about the courage it might take to live, to love or to create a work of art – where the payback is those few, singular moments that illuminate and incandesce amidst the everyday, the mundane, the painful and the terrifying of ‘the hours’ of existence.

In London 1923, Los Angeles 1949, and New York in the late 1990s, three women – Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan – each live through a single day. A sublime little book, inspired by Woolf’s novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (which one doesn’t need to have read*).At least as brilliant as Woolf, even (dare I say it?) an improvement on her, although of course hugely indebted and written in homage. It combines the same evocation of stream of consciousness and the epiphanies to be found in fleeting moments with more narrative drive and accessibility. It’s full of poignant, delicious echoes and resonances between the three lives, and subtle references to Woolf (there was one to ‘To The Lighthouse’ and, I'm sure, many others I didn't spot).The final narrative twist took me by surprise, and I loved it; I either didn’t notice it in the film version of The Hours, or I don’t remember noticing it. A bonus pleasure is that Clarissa Vaughan thinks she sees Meryl Streep in the street, and Streep plays Clarissa Vaughan in the film.I have had this book on my wish list forever, and am so glad one of my reading groups picked it.*I read ‘Mrs Dalloway’ a long time ago, in the late 60s probably. Out of interest, I’ve just printed off “CliffsNotes” on its plot; there are a great many links with ‘The Hours’.

OK I didn’t love this, as I found it contrived and annoyingly self-referential and a bit pretentious about the creative process and the structure of the source Virginia Woolf novel. But I have to admit the author largely pulls it off, although (interestingly) I liked and believed the Virginia Woolf character’s story most. So a rather grudging 4 stars from me, probably 3.5 rounded up.

The last time, when I read this novel without reading Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I really liked it, but this time, reading it after reading Woolf’s novel. This renewed my insight of the drama and themes played out long after making a deeper impression on me.