It’s harder to write about the books that I loved. I started reading this, years ago, and stopped, losing interest almost immediately. The initial idea behind this book-reading project was going to be “supposedly-great novels I never got around to finishing,” and Mrs Dalloway would have been first on that list (One Hundred Years of Solitude is another one). Instead I put it off until this year, and now I will count it as of my favorite books of all time.
I read the same copy I’ve had lying around for years, and when I reached to dog-ear a passage I particularly loved, I saw that I had already done so once before. I can’t imagine, then, why I put the book down — I find this so beautifully Modernist.
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turn at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory — away the aeroplane shot.