One of my favorite books ever. I'll never stop thinking about Orlando.

I wanted to like this really badly but alas it is dry as fuck. i’d apologize to virginia woolf for saying that but she still owes me for several hours of awful class discussions on To The Lighthouse. let’s call it even 

incredibly dense, wordy, garrulous — almost always on purpose, but there’s a certain point where the page-long paragraphs start blurring together despite the satirical point in having them. small parts of this got a chuckle out of me, I’ll give it that, but in general I had to push myself to pick it up again 

I think this being billed as a capital q queer book is a bit of a trap: it is undoubtedly a book about a queer person directly engaging with their gender identity & performance, but you are also inundated with a lot of pithy jabs at multiple eras of eng lit and British society between the interesting gender bits. I’m sure people can write really interesting things with gender and the Victorians or something from this but as a casual read I think you could find much more engaging queer material. 

I also just think the book is boring. As someone who spent much of her eng degree focusing on many of the poets & lit trends woolf has a go at here, i expected to get more kicks out of it. oh well

overall: a snooze, if a culturally important one. i don’t think i like virginia woolf

That was so fucking boring. I put the audio on 4x speed and it still wasn't over fast enough. And it was so racist. If that's the greatest sapphic love letter the English language has to offer we've failed as a people.

I want to start this review by saying that I feel like didn't fully understand this book. There were many lines that felt like a reference that I didn't get despite the many annotations that came with my edition. Be it because I'm not British, didn't live in the 1920's, wasn't part of the Bloomsbury group, am not Vita, or just because I'm dumb. Some of these may not even have been a real reference to anything and just randomness that comes with the "stream of consciousness" method. The "stream of consciousness" sections were amazing and interesting at first but did get tiring very fast. The author's writing is very funny though, in that way where it takes you a few seconds to realise there was a joke there but when you do it lights all parts of your brain. The book is full of reflections and commentaries, some interesting some not so much, many involving Orlando's legs. So many, I stopped reading to google Vita Sackville's to know what the author was talking about. The entirety of the text felt, just like Vita's son said, like a very long love letter to her. And I mean all kinds of love, be it friendship, be it romantic, be it admiration. All together in 200 or so pages.