The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

This is my summer to read Virginia. This book just proves what a genius she was. There is something about her writing that is so thoughtful and clear. I am not sure that this would be very interesting for most people, but I have read most of the authors she talks about in this collection of essays. So, I loved hearing her "TAKE" on them. 

It also makes me sad. How often brilliance and mental illness are closely linked. Sadness. Yet, C.S. Lewis was brilliant, but he found God. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

One of the most articulate and enjoyable essayists of the modern era, Virginia Woolf makes literary criticism personal, private musing universal, and social commentary both particular and purposeful. Woolf’s essays are legion, and they have been collected and regrouped in any number of individual volumes. Start with the pieces the author gathered in two volumes and called The Common Reader, in which Woolf assembles a refined personal library. Scholarship takes a back seat to serendipity, education seems—as it should—a circuit of enthusiasms, and a serious mind finds its shape among the sentences and sentiments that speak most directly to it. In these engaging volumes, Woolf develops her understanding while the reader learns valuable lessons about Chaucer and the Elizabethans, Montaigne and Defoe, Joseph Addison and Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot. Of special note are the essays “On Not Knowing Greek” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (in the first volume), and “How Should One Read a Book?” (in the second). Making their acquaintance, one gains insight not only into reading, but into thinking and being as well.