Funny old day / Favourite books

 It's Tuesday 26th September in 2023. Just gone off sick from work. All very peculiar feeling rather lost about what my job is. Plus this hypothyroidism is a real pain at the moment.

Anyway, after reading Woolf's Jacob's Room, just what are my top five novels????

Homer - The Iliad - Read it 5 times and counting. Just love it so

Dostoyevsky - The Brother's Karamazov or maybe Crime and Punishment

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore or maybe The Wind up Bird Chronicle

Franz Kafka - The Trial

Albert Camus - The Stranger

Heroditus - Histories

Woolf - Jacob's Room

Hmm, that's quite a large '5', and had to make some tough decisions

Homer - The Iliad - Read it 5 times and counting. Just love it so

Dostoyevsky - The Brother's Karamazov or maybe Crime and Punishment

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

Heroditus - Histories

Woolf - Jacob's Room

OK 5 and a bit. I guess Murakami is the unexpected one, but at least not quite as predictable as the others

Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room

 Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room

Wow Wow Fucking Wow Fucking wow!!!!!

This at risk of being my best read ever?!?!? 295 books in and this may be the most amazing book that I'll ever read? It made my feel sick in my stomach I think. Still think V Woolf is a stuck up cow though.

Oh Mrs Flanders to lose your son.

The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed with a void in place of the central character if, indeed, the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms.

Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel. Jacob is described to us, but in such indirect terms that it would seem better to view him as an amalgam of the different perceptions of the characters and narrator. He does not exist as a concrete reality, but rather as a collection of memories and sensations.

Plot summary

Set in pre-war England, the novel begins in Jacob's childhood and follows him through college at Cambridgeand into adulthood. The story is told mainly through the perspectives of the women in Jacob's life, including the repressed upper-middle-class Clara Durrant and the uninhibited young art student Florinda, with whom he has an affair. His time in London forms a large part of the story, though towards the end of the novel he travels to Italy and then Greece.