School Book: Wuthering Heights

I wasn't very excited when I found out I had to read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The professor I TA for sold it to me as more prose poetry. And after the last two books I had to read for that class (Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway), I was dreading another similar book. But thankfully, my fears were laid to rest relatively early on: Wuthering Heights was quite dissimilar to the aforementioned books.

Wuthering Heights tells a bizarre story when all is said and done. Mr. Earnshaw brings a gypsy/orphan boy named Heathcliff home and raises him as his favourite. Heathcliff gains the affection of Mr. Earnshaw's daughter Catherine while gaining the animosity of his son, Hindley. After Mr. Earnshaw passes away, Hindley relegates Heathcliff to the status of a servant, but Catherine remains his friend. But even though she loves him, she decides to accept the marriage proposal of another for a secure future, prompting Heathcliff to seek his fortune and later revenge on those who wronged him (including Catherine's husband for stealing her away).

Unfortunately I felt that Wuthering Heights kind of lost it at the end. The book was good overall, but the ending was just okay. That being said, I still recommend it if you want an excellent tale of love and obsession.

School Book: Mrs. Dalloway

Before I begin, I just want to say that this is not a picture of me, or one that I took. It was the only picture I could find with the cover of the book I read.

Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway is the last book I have to read for the class I TA before the first set of marking. And unfortunately, I really did not enjoy it. Mrs Dalloway kind of reminded me of Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. But where Smart's book was all about the narrator's emotions, Woolf's book was all about the character's streams of consciousness. The book would follow what one character was thinking, then latch onto another one for awhile. And it seemed to ramble on; there would be elaborate descriptions which I could not connect to characters or whomever they were referring to.

The basic "plot" of the book is that Mrs. Dalloway is having a party at the end of the day. So most of the book follows people who are around her. Most of the characters that you meet do go to her party, but there are a few who do not. As the book progresses, you learn a lot about everyone, but I guess mostly Mrs. Dalloway and those who are closest to her.

I found Mrs Dalloway to be very boring. I had a hard time following anything because there wasn't really much of a story. Now, as you may know, I like a good story, so I was not at all happy reading this book. Now that it's over, I'm going to read something good.