A review by jackiekeating
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

1.0

This is easily the worst book I have read since reading Sophie's World seven years ago. It has the same impossibly complex prose which is meant to sound wonderful and intellectual but actually is suffocatingly boring as Sophie's World. I imagine the only reason people applaud this book and hail it as a masterpiece and Joyce the most influential Irish author of all time is that 1) it is an emperor-with-no-clothes scenario and that we are supposed to like it, so everyone pretends to and 2) Joyce is one of probably 3 total Irish authors, so he wins the title by default. All in all reading this took me a really long time and was an unenjoyable experience. I will not be voluntarily reading anything by Joyce ever again.