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In many ways putting my thoughts to a work of this scope is difficult. If understanding Ulysses could be quantifiable to a percentage, I imagine I understood less than 30% of the allusions and references etc etc that Joyce put in the book. There was a lot that I didn't 'enjoy' reading, but I felt I could at least partially appreciate, even without fully understanding. But reading Ulysses isn't impossible and I don't feel like I've scaled a mountain of intellectual achievement or shown myself to be more erudite than the average person.
I liked a lot of the dirty jokes and weirdness of Circe, and the doomed-romance-style prose of Nausicaa, and the way Irish people (like myself) behave at funerals in Hades, and so on and so on. I intend to reread this book many times, presumably in an increasingly scholarly context, but it can be read, and I feel, appreciated, purely as a book, like any other, that has the capacity to entertain and evoke real emotion.
edit: Read no. 2:
What can I say? Even better than the first. My reintroduction into the text, this time in an academic context, was tremendously engaging and intimidating. Literary criticism, theory and all the makeup of academia are things I find fascinating and would love to devote a career into, yet for as much as I enjoyed rereading Ulysses under the guise of further understanding, part of me is very much afraid I'm simply too stupid to add anything to its discussion. No doubt I'll reread this next year - it feels as a text as much of a mirror into oneself as it is a microcosm of Dublin and Everything in It.
I liked a lot of the dirty jokes and weirdness of Circe, and the doomed-romance-style prose of Nausicaa, and the way Irish people (like myself) behave at funerals in Hades, and so on and so on. I intend to reread this book many times, presumably in an increasingly scholarly context, but it can be read, and I feel, appreciated, purely as a book, like any other, that has the capacity to entertain and evoke real emotion.
edit: Read no. 2:
What can I say? Even better than the first. My reintroduction into the text, this time in an academic context, was tremendously engaging and intimidating. Literary criticism, theory and all the makeup of academia are things I find fascinating and would love to devote a career into, yet for as much as I enjoyed rereading Ulysses under the guise of further understanding, part of me is very much afraid I'm simply too stupid to add anything to its discussion. No doubt I'll reread this next year - it feels as a text as much of a mirror into oneself as it is a microcosm of Dublin and Everything in It.