Ava read and liked Elizabeth's review of The Years:

"I love that this book doesn't end with the death of one of the main characters (actually no one dies at the end, please forgive the spoiler). Virginia Woolf writes about life, about normal people of the types that she knew, and what they do or do not...more I love that this book doesn't end with the death of one of the main characters (actually no one dies at the end, please forgive the spoiler). Virginia Woolf writes about life, about normal people of the types that she knew, and what they do or do not make of their lives. Often she looked at life by how these characters react to a death (I started to write "these people," forgetting, again, that they are fictional). There is a death in the novel; the Pargiter family is living through the long, terminal illness of the mother of the family. The reactions of each of the family members establish our relationships with them. It's these relationships that carry us through the brief glimpses we see of them again as the years pass. The years pass, literally. It's called the years because each chapter is a different year. In each year a character will be seen for a moment. Some are seen just for a paragraph, and some are followed around as they interact with other members of the extended family.

There's a flow in the path the characters take (call it stream of consciousness if you like). She also describes the flow of the city, London, by following the traffic. In the 1880s, they travel by carriage, then by bus, and over time by car. She observes class and economic differences this way as well; who has the first car? Who walks? What is the reaction to the other people on the bus?

Oh, god, do I love her. What she was able to do in her work, what she looked at in people, what she thought about life, how she was able to express all these things without any out-of-the-ordinary situations. They have tea, they have lunch, they have dinner, they have an evening party. There isn't a life-changing quest, there isn't a dark tragedy to overcome, it's just her observations about how people live, what they want in life, and how they don't really know how to get it. She asks if we manage to miss what we want because we don't know how to ask for it, or sometimes even name it, and she looks at how people get a long without having found that true thing (whatever that person's particular true thing is).

I have read all of her novels now (some several times) as well as her diaries and some of her letters. The more I know about Virginia Woolf as a person, the more I appreciate what she does in her novels. She lost both her mother and father before she was in her mid-twenties. She lost her brother (and almost her sister as well) in her twenties. She dealt with a lot of illness and death in her early life that she didn't talk about (you wouldn't believe the holding-it-all-together tone of her letters from these periods). She did not let the emotions touch her, in public at least. So to come across a lingering illness and the family's reactions, the chores, the resentment, and the love, in one of her last novels, is really special. It lets me know that she hadn't just kept all those feelings inside all that time.

I want to go on and on about this one. It's a book that needs to be talked about and thought through. It is one that gives you more each time you read it. I know that Leonard Woolf lied to Virginia about it (he told her it was better than her previous novels) to keep her motivated to edit it and prepare it for publication. It's difficult for me to understand why he thought he needed to lie about it. It's not as lyrically beautiful as The Waves and it doesn't have the focus that makes Mrs. Dalloway so special, but this is a complete, complex work of a mature author and it has a polish to it that I didn't see in her books before. She knew what she wanted to do and she did it, with more courage than she had before. It's a wonderful book.(less) "

Ava added a quote:
"I like men who have a future and women who have a past." — Wilde

Ava read and liked Hamid's review of عامه‌پسند:

"پیشنهاد نمی‌کنم. گویا قرار بوده هجویه‌ای باشه بر رمان‌های کارآگاهی. اما چیزی که من دیدم بیشتر سردرگمی و پراکندگی بود. نمی‌دونم چقدر میش�...more پیشنهاد نمی‌کنم. گویا قرار بوده هجویه‌ای باشه بر رمان‌های کارآگاهی. اما چیزی که من دیدم بیشتر سردرگمی و پراکندگی بود. نمی‌دونم چقدر میشه انداخت گردن مترجم. چون ترجمه‌ی قبلیش از بوکفسکی -مجموعه شعر سوختن در آب غرق شدن در آتش- ترجمه‌ی جالبی نبود. اما ضعف کتاب بیشتر از اون بود که بخواد فقط کار مترجم باشه. از بوکفسکی موسیقی آب گرم رو خونده بودم که خیلی دوست داشتم و یک سری شعر با ترجمه‌ی یکی از دوستان وبلاگ‌نویس، که اونا هم عالی بودن. اما این رمان هیچ راضیم نکرد(less) "