The Years

I tried really hard to like this book. In many ways it should be wonderful: a complex, layered slice of English lives. But it never really feels like it gets started -- it perfectly gets across the phenomenology of being at a party and not quite knowing everyone, or catching sight of yourself in a mirror and wondering how you got there in life, which seems to be what Woolf was trying to do. But this ends being a bit self-defeating, because the whole thing is so well-observed and so true to life and covers so much ground that everyone already knows what these things feel like anyway! Felt a bit like reading a dictionary in one's own language.