Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1915)

It took me an unfortunately long time to read this because I moved apartments while I was in the middle of it, lost the book in the move, and then waited a few months before getting a library membership and taking it out. I think I enjoyed it a bit less than I would have if I'd given it my sustained focus. It is in some ways a hard book, because its rhythm is very slow and because so much of it is this minute-by-minute tracking of the mental processes behind everyday activities, which is amazing and it is done well here, but you can miss if you're not paying close attention. It's not an airplane book.
There's a split authorial personality. The core of the book is a portrait of Woolf's mother and father. Their children are running around all over the novel and in some way necessarily Woolf occupies the role of child of her parents, or at least member of her own family. But there is another important character who is not a member of the family but a visitor to their summer house, Lily Briscoe, a painter. Amost Lily's whole being in the book centres around a landscape that she is painting and trying the whole time to get right - not in terms of faithful representation, but rhythmically. It's like Woolf is telling the story of her work in trying to find the right moments of light and shadow to best paint this group portrait. She is both in and out, which is also necessarily true of a writer. And this book gives a particularly good demonstration of that without any self-reference or post-modern piercing of frameworks. Then towards the end the children gain some subjectivity and we see the parents through their eyes as well as through the parents own thoughts about themselves and each other.
I'm thinking about rhythm because I read recently that Woolf once wrote in a diary that writing is all about getting the rhythm. Once you've understood your rhythm and can get into it, the words you use don't matter much. I love that. And this book is so full of awesome rhythms. I love Cam's sequence of emotions on the sailboat going toward the lighthouse. Earlier, she and her brother made a compact (presumably unspoken but real to each of them) to be sullen and unhappy throughout the trip in protest of their father's overbearing, selfish manner. But then Cam's on the boat and the water is spraying and the air is blowing in her hair and she's trying to hold onto being unhappy but she can't help feeling the exhilaration of being on the sailboat. She goes back to the unhappiness for a moment, calling to mind her good reasons for being unhappy and the need for loyalty to her brother, then she feels the pull of the moment, and back and forth until the prior emotion breaks and she is in the good happy feeling, which incidentally also allows her to think lovingly of her father again. I used to feel like that all the time, wanting to hold onto some pact I'd made with myself to resist the temptations of false happiness. The push and pull and the actual slowness and uncertainty of shifts in emotion are perfectly true, as are the depictions at other points in the book of the quickness and randomness of shifts from enjoyment to sudden annoyance at some small thing someone does, and back again. It's like Woolf is telling us that the reality of human beings is really the opposite of the humours theory, that a character is made up of constant minute backs and forths, the sum total of which will create a person who overall seems one way or another, happy or bitter or serious. It makes me think of physical balance, in which stillness is only achieved through constant tiny adjustments of little muscles in different parts of the body that are all active and actually moving the body from place to place in order to attain an overall appearance of stillness. 

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Wolf Hall might be the best political thriller ever written, but then I'm not an expert in the genre. Anyhow it totally gripped me from beginning to end. My only disappointment was that there wasn't more -- I felt like I was cut off abruptly from the ongoing machinations. It has the kind of ending where if it was a movie you'd know they were setting you up for the sequel rather than giving you a stand-alone first film. I guess I'll have to buy a real history book to see how it plays out.

It's a fictionography of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII. He was an extraordinary character if this book is to be believed: became fluent in every language he was exposed to, could make money without even really thinking about it, didn't need to sleep, always knew the right thing to say, was stronger and physically tougher than anyone else even as he grew older, and was really, really knowledgeable about textiles. Also loyal, kind, reasonable, loving and pretty gender-egalitarian for the time period. I was occasionally annoyed, as I got further into the book, that there was almost no criticism of Cromwell. It made him seem un-round, but it's also lots of fun to read a book with such an easily heroic hero. There's more than enough criticism of Henry and the Boleyns and Mary to make up for Cromwell's virtues.

The book isn't moving or worldview-altering, but it is impressive. Mantel is amazing at inventing interior lives and detailed relationships that flesh out the historical account. It's so well done that it's hard to believe they're not fictional. I kept thinking that as I read, and then thinking it must not make a difference. But it must take much greater force of character to add all that to the insides of a real person, rather than making someone up over whom you would have total dominion.