The Hours by Michael Cunningham: Sometimes I wish books came with reading prerequisites listed on the cover. There are very few novels with which one can assume the average person will be familiar. In The Hours, I suspect it would have been rather helpful to have first read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Or be, you know, at all familiar with Woolf in the first place. Not that a quick skim of the Wikipedia plot summary wasn’t enough for me to understand the story, but I think I would have gotten a lot more out of it were I able to pick up on the subtle references to Woolf’s characters. All in all, I wasn’t too impressed with this one. It wasn’t bad; it just didn’t really pull me in at all. I didn’t care much about the characters, the depressing bits felt meaningless, and the introspection was nothing I hadn’t heard before. I suspect I might enjoy a Cunningham novel not based on another book. I’m just not sure I’ll ever get around to picking one up.

Also posted on BookCrossing.