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I took a course on Ulysses at Stanford Extension. All the students were people who wanted to be there, and I had a teacher who'd been teaching it for 50 years.

I took a course on Ulysses at Stanford Extension. All the students were people who wanted to be there, and I had a teacher who'd been teaching it for 50 years. You can't get a much more ideal environment than that. This is the canonical Difficult Book. So I was hoping to have that elusive pleasure of finally cracking it. You can't call me unwilling. Nope. I was unimpressed. I thought that stream-of-consciousness was novel at the time, but now it's routine. Showing how people's minds really work (fragmented): same thing, who cares? Oxen of the Sun: the use of 14 or whatever different English prose styles to say the same thing: who TF cares? The teacher enthused, "He can do whatever he wants with the English language!" I thought, "Yeah, so what?" So I don't think "difficult" is automatically bad, but it's not automatically good, either. "To what end?" is the question I'd ask.

wittierusername 3y ago
My experience with Ulysses was just reading Dubliners followed by A Portrait of a Man then Ulysses. I've always enjoyed reading classics and "arty" books, like buying works by Salinger, Plato, Pynchon, whatever. I'm by no means an impressive reader but I like just letting them wash over me. Like sticking a great movie on - maybe I don't know all the nuances of Stanley Kubrick but it's just a movie at the end of the day. You watch it. Reading, watching, listening to "challenging" or highly rated/influential art....worst comes to it, you don't really like it. Anyway, Joyce literally wasn't aiming to write a difficult book. He famously said "this is for them" while gesturing towards the general public in Dublin. It's an ambitious novel and a misunderstood one, but it's a funny, goofy work with something for everyone. There's dogs, pubs and trad music in it Finnegan's wake is genuinely an essentially cryptographic novel. But I'd honestly recommend anyone who reads a lot to read Ulysses
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I can live with that. I'm not on a campaign against the book, except maybe to say, "Hey, if you don't care for it, there's nothing wrong with you." I don't know the exact quote, but I think Joyce also said that it was just a funny book. I didn't find it all that funny, and especially, didn't find any of the three main characters at all interesting. But YMMV. Check it out.

wittierusername 3y ago

My experience with Ulysses was just reading Dubliners followed by A Portrait of a Man then Ulysses. I've always enjoyed reading classics and "arty" books, like buying works by Salinger, Plato, Pynchon, whatever. I'm by no means an impressive reader but I like just letting them wash over me. Like sticking a great movie on - maybe I don't know all the nuances of Stanley Kubrick but it's just a movie at the end of the day. You watch it. Reading, watching, listening to "challenging" or highly rated/influential art....worst comes to it, you don't really like it. Anyway, Joyce literally wasn't aiming to write a difficult book. He famously said "this is for them" while gesturing towards the general public in Dublin. It's an ambitious novel and a misunderstood one, but it's a funny, goofy work with something for everyone. There's dogs, pubs and trad music in it Finnegan's wake is genuinely an essentially cryptographic novel. But I'd honestly recommend anyone who reads a lot to read Ulysses

AlbertCory 3y ago
I can live with that. I'm not on a campaign against the book, except maybe to say, "Hey, if you don't care for it, there's nothing wrong with you." I don't know the exact quote, but I think Joyce also said that it was just a funny book. I didn't find it all that funny, and especially, didn't find any of the three main characters at all interesting. But YMMV. Check it out.