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3.64 AVERAGE
3.64 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I always think reading is subjective, one man’s meat is another man’s poison etc….BUT, whoever says Ulysses is boring or not worth battling through is just wrong. Ok! If I had to be glad I read one book in my life it might be this one.
This book is utterly incredible. I can’t say I have just finished Ulysses, more that I have just completed my first reading of it. It was a mind blowing, educational, fun, hilarious heart breaking and illuminating. The only down side is that I am going to have a hard job reading anything that follows this book and not seeing just weak imitation.
James Joyce famously said that if Dublin was wiped from the face of the world, it could be rebuilt from the pages of Ulysses ( well he said that but probably more eloquently). I don’t know about that but I do think that if a copy of Ulysses was projected into space, to be found light years from now by an alien race, they could reconstruct humanity based on this book. All of it.. right down to intimate details.. Gabriel García Márquez wrote: ‘Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. Joyce has broken the barriers between those three lives.
It isn’t an easy book, not one you can snuggle up in a corner and just read. I read each section alongside listening to the excellent audible book narrated by Jim Norton, then went back and slowly studied it line by line (a resource list below) and then read it through again. So each chapter took many days. A couple of chapters took over a week, and I have a lot of reading time….I know I still missed many allusions and can see how academics can make a career out of this one book. But it is worth every second I spent on it… the writing is pure gold. In fact some sections (e.g. Proteus) are like poetry.
I read many reviews here on GoodReads about Ulysses and one thing I have come to realise is that everyone reads a very different Ulysses.. we all come to it with our own unique minds. Sections others found difficult were not the ones I struggled with, so I think we should all go into this with an open mind and find our own reflections in it.
I can see why people cry ‘Style over Substance’ but I think they are missing the point entirely. Firstly the single day recorded in the narrative is so much more than a mundane traipsing around a city, each sentence bursts with life and meaning. The substance of the book is immense. There is a story, in fact there are hundreds of stories. And the ‘Style’ or rather the ‘styles’ are partly the point. Each chapter (or maybe more correctly, section) is a different style, including a romp through historic literary styles, musical scores, a shape shifting trippy stream of consciousness, catechism, a play, a woman trying to sleep but rambling through pages of thoughts with no punctuation etc etc I think there are probably four sections that I found particularly difficult, but maybe those were the most exciting to look back on after working slowly through them. The others are moderately difficult but also more enjoyable than I can say. My favourite section has to be the long final section inside the head of Molly Bloom. Wonderful!
James Joyce has been accused of showing off with his knowledge. That makes me so cross. The man was a sponge for knowledge, probably a savant. I really dislike that people would want him to have dumbed down and not just let his mind and writing flow freely and play with language, humanity and writing. I love that he drops clues and intrigues for us to find all the way through the book. Some of his intrigues will never be completely understood. I think the joy is trying to keep up, failing but enjoying the process of trying anyway.
Anyway, this isn’t a book to read to tick off a list. This is a book to take time over and truly live within its pages, for months at a time. I do not believe it can be enjoyed to its full extent without some help. I read it as part of the Hardcore Literature Bookclub, link below, and used the resources also listed
https://youtu.be/d7neg72gv8c
Ulysses Annotated (revised and expanded edition) by Don Gifford and Robert Seidman
James Joyce’s Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert
ReJoyce podcast by Frank Delaney
Blooms and Barnacles blog and podcast
https://youtu.be/-bj_tUIkYUY for a good summary of each section
Time
The engagement of the reader to think and not expect hand holding by Joyce
This book is utterly incredible. I can’t say I have just finished Ulysses, more that I have just completed my first reading of it. It was a mind blowing, educational, fun, hilarious heart breaking and illuminating. The only down side is that I am going to have a hard job reading anything that follows this book and not seeing just weak imitation.
James Joyce famously said that if Dublin was wiped from the face of the world, it could be rebuilt from the pages of Ulysses ( well he said that but probably more eloquently). I don’t know about that but I do think that if a copy of Ulysses was projected into space, to be found light years from now by an alien race, they could reconstruct humanity based on this book. All of it.. right down to intimate details.. Gabriel García Márquez wrote: ‘Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. Joyce has broken the barriers between those three lives.
It isn’t an easy book, not one you can snuggle up in a corner and just read. I read each section alongside listening to the excellent audible book narrated by Jim Norton, then went back and slowly studied it line by line (a resource list below) and then read it through again. So each chapter took many days. A couple of chapters took over a week, and I have a lot of reading time….I know I still missed many allusions and can see how academics can make a career out of this one book. But it is worth every second I spent on it… the writing is pure gold. In fact some sections (e.g. Proteus) are like poetry.
I read many reviews here on GoodReads about Ulysses and one thing I have come to realise is that everyone reads a very different Ulysses.. we all come to it with our own unique minds. Sections others found difficult were not the ones I struggled with, so I think we should all go into this with an open mind and find our own reflections in it.
I can see why people cry ‘Style over Substance’ but I think they are missing the point entirely. Firstly the single day recorded in the narrative is so much more than a mundane traipsing around a city, each sentence bursts with life and meaning. The substance of the book is immense. There is a story, in fact there are hundreds of stories. And the ‘Style’ or rather the ‘styles’ are partly the point. Each chapter (or maybe more correctly, section) is a different style, including a romp through historic literary styles, musical scores, a shape shifting trippy stream of consciousness, catechism, a play, a woman trying to sleep but rambling through pages of thoughts with no punctuation etc etc I think there are probably four sections that I found particularly difficult, but maybe those were the most exciting to look back on after working slowly through them. The others are moderately difficult but also more enjoyable than I can say. My favourite section has to be the long final section inside the head of Molly Bloom. Wonderful!
James Joyce has been accused of showing off with his knowledge. That makes me so cross. The man was a sponge for knowledge, probably a savant. I really dislike that people would want him to have dumbed down and not just let his mind and writing flow freely and play with language, humanity and writing. I love that he drops clues and intrigues for us to find all the way through the book. Some of his intrigues will never be completely understood. I think the joy is trying to keep up, failing but enjoying the process of trying anyway.
Anyway, this isn’t a book to read to tick off a list. This is a book to take time over and truly live within its pages, for months at a time. I do not believe it can be enjoyed to its full extent without some help. I read it as part of the Hardcore Literature Bookclub, link below, and used the resources also listed
https://youtu.be/d7neg72gv8c
Ulysses Annotated (revised and expanded edition) by Don Gifford and Robert Seidman
James Joyce’s Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert
ReJoyce podcast by Frank Delaney
Blooms and Barnacles blog and podcast
https://youtu.be/-bj_tUIkYUY for a good summary of each section
Time
The engagement of the reader to think and not expect hand holding by Joyce
hard to rate but i enjoyed it. finally breaking my 3 star streak
WHEW! I will come clean right up front that finishing this book was less of a treat than a pride thing. It's a classic and as a lifelong bookworm turn English major librarian I just really felt the need to be able to say that I'd read it. Now that I have, I will have to spend the rest of my life admitting that, while I listened to a richly narrated audiobook featuring a hypnotic Irish accent, I was less than bowled over in awe. I think to fully appreciate this tome I would need to be in some kind of course les by an expert on this specific work--it's so intricately layered that there is no way I could absorb it all by reading it on my own. Perhaps I'll revisit it one day, perhaps not. Either way, I can now say I have heard Joyce's strange, dense reimagining of The Odyssey.
Ulysses turned 100 in 2022! Joyce joked that it would keep professors busy for centuries. So far, so good. I won’t claim I grasped all the word-play, allusions & imagery in its 800 exhilarating, impenetrable, revelatory, raucous & down-right smutty pages. It might be the greatest novel ever written. Or it might be unreadable. Nabokov loved it. Virginia Woolf called it an “illiterate, underbred book.” I read it very slowly over several months with Spark Notes nearby. I also paired it with the terrific U22 podcast. I paid close attention to the Odyssey parallels & parodies—the heroic quest of warrior-king Odysseus reflected in the mundane Dublin wanderings of poor cuckolded Leopold Bloom. Still, some passages (OK, whole sections) remained as indecipherable as hieroglyphics. So was it worth it? Did the anarchic freedom of its Modernism-Gone-Mad draw me in? “yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Ulysses isn't a book. It's a literary marathon.
I'll admit, I decided to take on the challenge of this renowned modernist epic owing in large part to my own hubris. I thought I could handle it. I'd trained since I was 4 years old. I'd attended an incredibly expensive and pretentious university which prides itself on esoteric and antiquated reading lists. I normally pride myself on my above-average command of the English language.
And yet...
To keep with the earlier metaphor, my muscles almost locked up before I got to the finish line. There were words in this book I didn't recognize (and not just the ones in languages other than English or Irish-specific idioms, I'm talking rare, archaic English words), and I really can't remember the last time I've read a book that caused me to consult an English dictionary multiple times. At some points I think I even stopped acknowledging words themselves, my eyes just glossing over the little groups of symbols while my brain simply stopped caring.
But then there were all the other parts...
This book is an absurd and wonderful thing. I'm glad I'm part of the strange and perhaps masochistic bunch that have read its entirety. Finishing this book was, for me, its own reward. It has its moments of brilliant clarity that are embedded in the opaque ridiculousness of Joyce's intellect, it has great puns, it has improbably long lists, it has some low-hanging meanings or allegories or styles I recognized that goaded me on, winking, suggesting "Doesn't it feel nice to be in on the joke sometimes?"
800-odd pages later, I can only say that sometimes yes, yes it does, yes.
I'll admit, I decided to take on the challenge of this renowned modernist epic owing in large part to my own hubris. I thought I could handle it. I'd trained since I was 4 years old. I'd attended an incredibly expensive and pretentious university which prides itself on esoteric and antiquated reading lists. I normally pride myself on my above-average command of the English language.
And yet...
To keep with the earlier metaphor, my muscles almost locked up before I got to the finish line. There were words in this book I didn't recognize (and not just the ones in languages other than English or Irish-specific idioms, I'm talking rare, archaic English words), and I really can't remember the last time I've read a book that caused me to consult an English dictionary multiple times. At some points I think I even stopped acknowledging words themselves, my eyes just glossing over the little groups of symbols while my brain simply stopped caring.
But then there were all the other parts...
This book is an absurd and wonderful thing. I'm glad I'm part of the strange and perhaps masochistic bunch that have read its entirety. Finishing this book was, for me, its own reward. It has its moments of brilliant clarity that are embedded in the opaque ridiculousness of Joyce's intellect, it has great puns, it has improbably long lists, it has some low-hanging meanings or allegories or styles I recognized that goaded me on, winking, suggesting "Doesn't it feel nice to be in on the joke sometimes?"
800-odd pages later, I can only say that sometimes yes, yes it does, yes.
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
A hearty "Meh."
Clearly a triumph of cultural accumulation and linguistic mastery, but offers so much less in the way of story than I prefer in a novel.
Clearly a triumph of cultural accumulation and linguistic mastery, but offers so much less in the way of story than I prefer in a novel.
I didn't actually read this. I listened (in podcast form) to the 1982 RTE Radio production interspersed with the accompanying 2004 conversation between Gerry O'Flaherty and Fritz Senn. It was a good move on my part, I think. I doubt I'll ever have the fortitude to get through this thing in text.
Having said that, in a way, I loved this book. Joyce knew how to use language in ways that I could only ever dream. Every chapter was exciting and playful and fun, even when it was... Well, I'll get to that. Some of them were even, so far as I could understand them, very funny. I enjoyed the grandiosity of the recounting of the men's unimportant conversation, and I genuinely laughed aloud at the deliberate badness of the prose employed to describe Bloom and Daedalus' late night walk. The characters were truly fantastic, too. Bloom leapt off the page from moment one, abhorrent as he could be. Molly was great well before we even met her, and she was even better afterwards. Daedalus was insufferable, though I have no doubt he was meant to be so.
Also, I hated this book. Joyce was clever, and he knew it, and so much of this book was dedicated to him showing it off to no real purpose. I guess there probably wasn't *meant* to be a purpose except for the exercise itself, and I'm sure I just don't have the education or experience or disposition to comprehend why this is a good thing, but oh boy, did I find it annoying at times. I also suspect (though I definitely don't have the education to know for sure) that this book is to blame for many of the things I find annoying in certain modern fiction. What do you call it? Modernist? Postmodernist? When stylistic decisions appear to be made in the interest of establishing artistic cred rather than contributing to the story in any way? I hate it every time and I'd place a small bet that lines can be drawn from the worst offenders I've read to this very book.
The thing is, though, that all my opinions here are really nothing more than suspicions. I suspect that the things I enjoyed were meant to be enjoyable in that way. I suspect that Ulysses is not really a novel and is more a masterclass showcase of talent not unlike a season of Australian Idol in which the contestant nails the prompt week after week, except Joyce came up with his own challenges and they were all a bit crazy. But I don't know that for sure. I don't know anything for sure. And that's why I can't give this any kind of rating. At any rate, I suspect it's a bit beyond ratings. But I'm not sure.
Having said that, in a way, I loved this book. Joyce knew how to use language in ways that I could only ever dream. Every chapter was exciting and playful and fun, even when it was... Well, I'll get to that. Some of them were even, so far as I could understand them, very funny. I enjoyed the grandiosity of the recounting of the men's unimportant conversation, and I genuinely laughed aloud at the deliberate badness of the prose employed to describe Bloom and Daedalus' late night walk. The characters were truly fantastic, too. Bloom leapt off the page from moment one, abhorrent as he could be. Molly was great well before we even met her, and she was even better afterwards. Daedalus was insufferable, though I have no doubt he was meant to be so.
Also, I hated this book. Joyce was clever, and he knew it, and so much of this book was dedicated to him showing it off to no real purpose. I guess there probably wasn't *meant* to be a purpose except for the exercise itself, and I'm sure I just don't have the education or experience or disposition to comprehend why this is a good thing, but oh boy, did I find it annoying at times. I also suspect (though I definitely don't have the education to know for sure) that this book is to blame for many of the things I find annoying in certain modern fiction. What do you call it? Modernist? Postmodernist? When stylistic decisions appear to be made in the interest of establishing artistic cred rather than contributing to the story in any way? I hate it every time and I'd place a small bet that lines can be drawn from the worst offenders I've read to this very book.
The thing is, though, that all my opinions here are really nothing more than suspicions. I suspect that the things I enjoyed were meant to be enjoyable in that way. I suspect that Ulysses is not really a novel and is more a masterclass showcase of talent not unlike a season of Australian Idol in which the contestant nails the prompt week after week, except Joyce came up with his own challenges and they were all a bit crazy. But I don't know that for sure. I don't know anything for sure. And that's why I can't give this any kind of rating. At any rate, I suspect it's a bit beyond ratings. But I'm not sure.