I've never read anything like this but it was so impressive. It was also challenging, frustrating, and required great attention. But the pay off was so worth it. It took me years to really understand how to read Virginia Woolf but I am in awe of her now. She had a brilliant mind and a great talent. She just requires your full attention to every sentence and that was a skill that took time for me to develop, but she has fully won me over with this book. ( )

一道幽深的阴影出现在地平线上，分开了海和天，那块灰色的布面上现出一道道色彩浓重的条带，它们前后翻滚，在水下，你推我拥，相互追逐，绵延不绝。

时钟发出嘀嗒的响声，它的两条指针如在大漠中跋涉的车队，钟面上的黑色条纹就是绿洲。分针向前奔走着寻找水源，而时针只能痛苦地在沙漠炙热的石块中跌跌撞撞地前行，它就要死在沙漠里了。

我手里捧着我的忧伤——不，不是我的忧伤，而是我们这人生的难以理解的答案——依次走到他们跟前，请他们检验。有的人去找牧师；有的人依靠诗歌；而我则依靠我的朋友，依靠我自己的心，在各种辞藻和断简残篇当中，寻觅某种完整无缺的东西——对我来说，月亮和树木中的美还显得不够；对我来说，一个人与另一个人的接触就是一切，然而我感到连这个也是难以捉摸的，因为我是那么的不完整，那么的脆弱，那么难以言喻的孤独。我就是这样坐在那里。

This was an experimental novel for Woolf, one that succeeded grandly.

Taking notes, which I sometimes do, helped me follow along with these abbreviated descriptions of her sixl characters, who grew up together and remained connected in various ways throughout their lives. ( )

Oh Virginia Woolf...my greatest inspiration for writing style and gender. She was way ahead of her time in so many ways. The Waves is my favorite because it introduced me to the stream of consciousness style of writing, of the intimacy of being inside the head of a character. It is an experimental style novel with prose that reads a lot like poetry and the story is told through six children's own soliloquies. Themes of individuality, self, community also seem almost to be a part of the same one consciousness. When I first encountered this book I was stunned by the concept and fell in love with it. There is nothing else like reading Virginia Woolf. ( )

The rare five star review. Woolf as much as any modernist writer is able to capture the feeling of consciousness, the particular impressionistic moment in nature, in a restaurant, on the tube. Here we have a Faulknerian changing of perspective that she plays with in To the Lighthouse and Orlando. The whole thing has to wash over you, like a Renoir; you can spend time lost in the details. The paragraphs stand alone as prose poems. It rewards slow reading, the teasing out meaning as the characters shift and age and mourn and experience the world. ( )