etc.

My fourth reading of this book and, like most classics, I enjoyed it even more than the third reading and I’m pretty sure it was the book, and not just my sparse memory, that accounts for me finding even more interesting and captivating little themes and textual nuances. Woolf does a tremendous job of molding those piddling, seemingly irrelevant and insignificant everyday tasks into flights of self-discovery on The Things That Matter, where a day in the life of one woman who is planning a party for her friend becomes as viable and worthwhile a subject as any. This is one of my favourite books of all time, which is why I read it again for the fourth time even when my list of to-reads is currently longer than my arm and my next-pile is a toppled over heap in my living room. And one of the main reasons why this is one of my favourite books of all time is because I love literature that sees the grandiose in the miniscule, that tackles the Big Questions in the mundane, prosaic everydayness of life, that mirrors the truly significant in the most insignificant of human acts. Not many can pull all this off like Woolf can and none of her other works provide as good an example of this sort of richly-textured, multi-faceted narrative as Mrs Dalloway does. And I can guarantee you that I will read it again.