The Years by Virginia Woolf

I think this was my third time reading this novel, and I've loved it for many years now. This time, I feel like I've really intellectually understood it as I did not before, previously I found it rather overwhelming, but very mysteriously and pleasantly so. This time, I was less awed, and maybe that ruined part of the charm for me. I still think it's a tremendous novel, but I understood many allusions to dark and upsetting subjects that I had missed before, and I thought that it was a little too heavily reliant on the Freudian model of consciousness (certain themes and images recurring like repressed memories, characters being unable to remember something specific that was disturbing them). I still find many of the interactions between characters somewhat bewildering, especially Sara and her behaviour. I have been trying to figure out for years whether she is mentally unbalanced or not. I found it much easier to keep up with the stream of consciousness and progression of the narrative, and it's a splendid novel to just absolutely sink into and get lost in, it really sweeps me away with it. But I couldn't stop noticing that people in the novel kept taking buses in London and actually reaching their destinations, which made me laugh since I have never managed to get anywhere on a bus in London without sacrificing half the day to the attempt. In a way, The Years seems to me to be the opposite of The Waves, because the characters seem to lack coherence and flow into one another, unlike The Waves, where every character is very distinct and coherent across time.