Just been taking a class on James Joyce, I'd almost forgotten how much I love his work. Maybe not so much the later more arcane stuff, but Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are I would say almost perfect books... Does anybody else like Joyce?
My friend is currently reading Ulysses, and he says it's one of the hardest books he's ever read due to the couple of chapters without punctuation. Could you give us some of his work that perhaps we could start off with, before reading his epic, Ulysses?
Yes, Ulysses is hard. Dubliners is a collection of short stories, my favourite one is "Araby" which you can read online: http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/29/63/frameset.html
I'm not one to call a literary spade a spade. I'm all in favour of elaborate prose and advanced metaphors. However, I find Ulysses to be unapproachable to the point of taking the enjoyment out of trying to read it. Literature, after all, when distilled to its fundamentals, is a form of entertainment. I have similar criticisms of Rushdie, particularly The Satanic Verses. Whilst no doubt one of the finest writers alive today, TSV is simply unapproachable and thus unenjoyable for me....
Yes, Ulysses might be more something for literary history academics to get excited over, but as I said, the first two books are I think perhaps perfect examples of the short story and the autobiographical novel respectively, eminently readable, moving and clever.
I like Joyce. "Ulysses" is one of my favorite books, I'm not a literary history academic or anything but I loved it. "Finnegans Wake" is great too.
