What readers think of The Hours, plus links to write your own review.

I did not enjoy this book. I thought it was very difficult to get into and never seemed to get anywhere. In addition to the many things I didn't enjoy in this book, I didn't think there were enough clues to tell the reader that each character was in different time. I haven't seen the movie, but I am guessing it isn't so great either.

I read this book as a reading club assignment. It was tough sledding; I found it both boring and pointless. The two "stories" in it (I put this in quotation marks because there's very litttle story in them) are at best separate short stories that contain nothing to explain the characters, particularly the California housewife, who simply seems to be suffering from extreme depression from an unspecified cause. Can't the homosexual community find something better than this?

The book was horrible I can't even imagine what the movie was like. Excuse me but not every woman feels the same as these women in the book. The book was obviously directed toward gay/lesbian readers. Plus it was soo depressing. I enjoy life and I think you should focus on the positive not the negative. I read this book for an English research paper and I would not recommend this book to anybody. So if your planning on becoming a lesbian then you should read the book.

it is quite a boring book

Barb
Of nine book club members, five liked the book, The Hours. To prepare for our discussion, we all viewed the Mrs. Dalloway video. We enjoyed comparing Woolf and Cunningham's stories. One big puzzlement that we found was that we weren't quite sure who Laura Brown was. Two people did not think that she was Richard's mother. Another two people insisted that she was his mother, but also was the lady across the way who rearranged her window figurines. Our book club likes discussions best when we disagree!

M. Hookey
This book was selected for discussion by the book group to which I belong. It is beautifully and cleverly written. I have to say, however, and I am speaking for myself alone, that the book comes together for me since we read Mrs. Dalloway as last month's selection. I would recommend that if it has been a while since you read Mrs.D, or if you have never read Virginia Woolf's very fine novel, you might want to give some consideration to reading it as a companion piece. But the bottom line is Mr. Cunningham has done a fine job of bringing all of these complex and fascinating characters together. A source of great pleasure; I enjoyed it immensely.