I watched the film of this shortly after it was released in 2002, but I've only just picked up the book. Luckily I watched it long enough ago to not remember much about the story. I loved this novel. I think it might well make my top ten books read this year.
Three stories:
A fictionalised account of a day in the life of Virginia Woolf when she was living in Richmond and desperate to move to London.
A day in the life of Mrs Brown who is struggling with her life as a wife and mother, and goes off in the middle of the day, hires a hotel room, and reads Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
A day in the life of Clarissa Vaughan who is arranging a party for friend, and one time lover, Richard.
The stories (in particular the latter two) come together at the end with heart-stopping tragedy.
(But, oh! that terrible cover.)

[ON MY TURNTABLE - AGAIN - TONITE: THE HOURS SOUNDTRACK, BY PHILIP GLASS....]

This novel buoyed me up at first, like the young author of Mrs Dalloway, then then DROPPED me like a hot potato.

I was sucked right in, I regret to say - along with its characters - to its depressive vortex.

I was led, as I say, to the soundtrack.

Mistake.

BIG mistake.

I've declared tomorrow my very own Mental Health Day.
***

There, it’s now tomorrow, or at least that’s what my nuit blanche's clock must say - as if a merry cuckoo somehow had gaily chimed MIDNIGHT.

Did you ever get one of those spiffy mp4 attachments to a friend’s or a sentimental LinkedIn email?

You open it, follow its inside jokes with barely-concealed amusement till you get to the punch line, and…

It’s just another chicken soupy reductio ad absurdem.

You’ve been had!

Well, this book’s the same.

It leads you by folding over your half-remembered childhood’s golden moments - those “timeless moments” so prized by Bloomsburian authors - and then hits you with kitchen-sink reality with its wollop of “same old, same old” hard, cold reality.

You just fell, hook, line and sinker, my friends.

And they call it the Birth of the Blues.

This is not stuff for old Bipolar Vets like me.

I’m happy the FDA hasn’t yet banned certain books, being a civil libertarian - but at the same time, I’m not.

Go figure that one out.

Anyway, in The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli says timeless moments don’t exist in the first place… and that’s a classic conundrum of relativity, very much like “what if you, and everything around you, were ten times bigger tomorrow - would you notice?”

The answer, of course, according to Albert Einstein is NO.

YOU’re ten times bigger too.

Haha...

Timelessness is a fact, which Rovelli patiently knocks into our dumb numbskulls.

Time is a result of our feeble human attempts to over-organize and invent explanations.

Timeless moments, though?

Not in my mocking cuckoo's singing.

Only God has ‘em.

And ALL the time.
***

But of course I don't in the least mean to be sacreligiously facetious - I love this book!

But Cunningham started it.

He grabbed my heart from my sleeve, which is where in my dotage I normally keep it, and it started playing frisbee with it.

A born rube, I probably deserved it.

I'm an emoter, and so is Cunningham, but he added stealth to the mix, and tripped me up with his purple wordflow.

But I forget.

Today I'm enforcing a ban on all deep thought and reading.

An absolute ban...

I mean it, Michael.

I'm not following you again today, down your hellish River Acheron -

And I won't pick this book up again, where I left off,

Until at least tomorrow.