POO: James Joyce

Dubliners

Ulysses

poem v from chamber music

dubliners is my shit

Ulysses

Portrait for me. I really like Ulysses but I have unresolved issues with it.

Exiles 0
Ulysses. Portrait was one of my favourite books for a long time, but I was bit restless last time I read it. Maybe I'm getting less tolerant of Stephen? Might even take Dubliners over it - more street detail and dialogue, plus The Dead.
But really enjoy the continual changes & big fun of Ulysses. Even if it pisses me off sometimes (there are plenty of points when I'm just thinking 'Nice work. Clever.') it's still so full of energy, enjoyment of the world, language, people, just an exciting sense of what can be done, that I've got to choose it.
I read a few pages of Finnegans Wake each week. Pretty sure I wouldn't take it over U even if I'd finished.

I've said this before, but to me Finnegans Wake is the pinnacle of human achievement in literature. I can understand why some people find Ulysses more enjoyable, and I have other books that are dearer to my heart, but there's something about FW that is just unbeatable. It pretty much makes ever trying to write anything again a pointless exercise.

why do you say that? srs question, i've always been totally intimidated by finnegans wake and i would like some good, inspiring arguments as to why it's worth the effort.

ulysses imo

joe, every word sings from the page. It's something of a joke that scholars sit around reading one sentence for a week because it's so impenetrable, but I have a feeling that actually they sit around reading one sentence for a week because that sentence is the best sentence ever written.

Dubliners with Ulysses a close second. Despite trying many times to get through it, I find Finnegans Wake too opaque to enjoy.

ok, was hoping for a bit more of an in-depth explanation, but your enthusiasm is infectious. i'll give it a go!

I guess Ulysses, but after reading it years ago not much has stuck with me--I'd much more likely go back to Portrait or Dubliners

ulysses was more of a challenge than a pleasure i read it when i was v young tho probably for the rong reasons and i really love dubliners which is stuffed with words like santa's sack is stuffed with gifts so that is the only one i would pick

read it again fool

i cant read any more i forgot how

Lamp I help you get started:

Stately, plump

Ulysses is meant to be sampled. In grad school I had a pretty good professor who nevertheless so intimidated the class with how much of "The Odyssey" and Harry Levin they had to know that (a) he didn't emphasize how much fun certain chapters are without relation to the Greek armature ("Hades" is particularly wonderful example of "realist" writing at its best); (b) some chapters are awful no matter how much preparation you've had.

Ulysses is meant to be sampled.

gotta say i strongly disagree with this. you either read the whole thing, or just decide it's not for you--not sure where the advantage is lies in sampling bits and pieces of it. i dig the Greek stuff but i feel like while you read it, even if you know about it, you can discard it or whatever. it's not meant to be a perfect fit.

I should have added "...after reading it once."

Oy, that chapter based on "music."

Sirens you mean? one of my favorite chapters

lol i like basically all of it. iirc last time it came up i was saying how much i loved ithaca and it turned out a bunch of people hated it--al u may have been 1 of them

I'm not fond of it, but some of the pompous questions inspire equally pompous answers, to hilarious effect.

I like "Eumaeus" a lot – maybe the best Henry James parody!

yeah ithaca was the funniest one i thought, also sort of sweet & sad

I think you can read Ulysses (and the Wake) either way you like and you'll get something worthwhile out of it. Is it a better educational experience to read the entirety of Ulysses? Well it's a more holistic experience and the threads that weave throughout the narrative will have more cohesion that way. But there is nothing wrong with reading a chapter here and there for the flavor of it. Either way, you're reading someof Ulysses and that is a good thing.

The latter way is certainly how I've read the Wake. There are pretty big chunks of it I've never gotten to.

I totally agree with the notion of sampling parts of Ulysses. Certain chapters are the best writing he ever did, others not so much. There are parts that I have read over and over again and parts that I will never return to.

i cant imagine reading only part of a book

i think sampling Ulysses is maybe okay after you read it once, but i'm a big believer in experiencing the entire book, as the author intended you to read it before you start a re-read. otherwise, you're getting this weird, skewed view of the book

like i've tried to read blood meridian 3 times. . . always stop around page 100, i don't consider blood meridian a book i have read, or understood, or completed, etc etc.

i now understand--blood meridian is not a book for me. and that's okay, i'm cool with that. but i would never pretend to have an idea about the book or anything

i cant imagine reading only part of a book

Not even after you've read it several times? I do it all the time.

Obv don't want to derail a James Joyce thread but I'm having exactly that problem with Blood Meridian at the moment. It seems to be going nowhere fast, which surprises me because The Road was so gripping. Anyway, back to Joyce…

that's how I felt about it too, I've been trying to read it off and on for 15 years. IN fact, the only McCarthy books I like are the non-overwritten ones (the road, child of god); the flowery ones just irritate me (the border trilogy)

alfred yah i hate skipping parts of a book even the stuff that bores me idk it still feels necessary when rereading something too

It's ok – I used to feel as you do. If I know the book well, I'm going to reread the parts I like best. But I reread books cover to cover all the time, too.

i'm so lame, i sometimes feel like i don't even "get" a book until the second reading

u. in a walk

actually, i've never finished any of the others: the extent to which this bothers me waxes and wanes.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

guess I'm not going to read finnegans wake before this poll closes

you have 24 hours

Hey, thread-starters! POO: Story in Dubliners and/or POO: Episode of Ulysses might prove worthwhile.

POO: Story in Dubliners - i can't see any sane person voting for anything other than "the dead", no?

araby, maybe. . .?

"the dead" is awesome no doubt but "two gallants" and "the boarding house" are a pretty mean one-two punch. it's like the worst stereotypes about dudes followed right up by the worst about women

I use "A Little Cloud" in class often; it always gets under the skin of those kids who didn't leave home for college.

I have a soft spot for Chamber Music, as the best set of Elizabethan lyrics written since the Restoration. But the world already had a lot of Elizabethan lyrics by then, so I voted Ulysses.

FW seems so hermetically inwitty as to be beyond reach to most of us, including me, and therefore seems more like the dozens of lost plays of Sophocles or the Margites of Homer: a great lost work.

No "the love letters he wrote to his wife" no credibility.

"My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down under me on that soft belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow,
glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair."

Dubliners

dubliners

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

And justice for all.

Was hoping Finnegans Wake would come in third so I could say "Thunder Words Are Show!"