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Re:Joyce


A Horse Named Stranger

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Small backstory. I wanted/needed a new book to read. So I decided to pick a book from the shelf, which was on my to read list for ages (and I picked up the copy on the cheap a while ago).

The work in question is of course Joyce Ulysses. I am roughly done with the first three or four chapters, and this reading is turning out to be more of a tedious chore than a recreational pleasure.

Long story short, is it just me who considers Ulysses to be rather long and boring, other readers experiences.

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No.  Ulysses is pretty widely considered a bad choice for an "enjoyable" read.  I haven't read it myself, and don't plan to. 

If you want to read some Joyce, you could check out The Dead, which is a very famous short story and much more readable.  I didn't love it, but I could at least appreciate it.  

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You have to be in the right mood for Joyce.  And Ulysses, as @Maithanet said, is not generally considered an enjoyable read.  The meandering — both in the narrative and in the stream on consciousness — and the huge number of allusions (many not very accessible to modern readers) can make it tough work, although the cleverness, observational insight and incredible phrasing are all there to enjoy.

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It isn't just you.

Even with a charismatic, fiercely-interested professor who invested himself in the text and even read portions of it aloud, passionately, while pacing the classroom, I found Ulysses hard to swallow.

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While I enjoy -- or used to, at least --  reading Joyce's short fiction and Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, when in grad school the only way I could read and enjoy either Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, was group reading. 

We students got together regularly to read out loud, in turn, from start to finish, these novels, interrupting, discussing, going out to get more beer (always More Beer! won't mention the other sort of substance imbibed), for entire semesters.

 With the kind of word play, vocal-audio play with rhythms and sounds, not to mention the jokes and outright comedy, that permeate these novels, reading aloud -- and in company -- seems the only way to go.  At least it was so for me.  This means that I got through both of them several times over the years, so am familiar with the texts (or at least used to be), but nothing, of course, like the scholars who delight in going through them constantly, and doing it in solitude. 

And as said, not done this for a long time.  The last time was the annual Bloomsday reading sponsored by an art gallery, fairly on in living here.  It was always a Big Deal in the "art world" of downtown NYC.  It hasn't happened now, for two years straight.

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We had a semester course in high school that was just reading Ulysses. The teacher was probably the best English teacher at my school and he was incredibly passionate about Joyce so the course was as much him as Ulysses and that made it work.  That along with reading it over the course of 4 months with a group of friends.  But yeah, I don't think I could just read it on my own for fun.  

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On 4/10/2021 at 12:10 PM, Wilbur said:

It isn't just you.

Even with a charismatic, fiercely-interested professor who invested himself in the text and even read portions of it aloud, passionately, while pacing the classroom, I found Ulysses hard to swallow.

Ever since my teenage years I have considered tackling James Joyce. As I near my 65th birthday, I wonder if I ever will. Some days I think the life remaining to me is too short to waste on a book I won't enjoy, but other times I wonder if I am missing out on a really fascinating read. And of course being in this Covid situation leaves me with a lot of time on my hands and a dearth of new stuff to find and read. One day I will make a decision.

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Well, I set my mind to soldiering through this novel. I will try to compensate my lack of youth with sheer stubbornness.

I could make a joke about keeping Joyce out of the novel, as the Dedalus bits were sheer torture imo.

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  • 9 months later...

Almost forgot to give an update on that project.

Took me a few months, including questioning every decission in my life that has lead me to there and wondering why are you doing this to yourself, but I eventually managed to finish it. 

And yes, I deserve a fucking parade. And no, not recommending doing to anybody else.

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