5 ms·

I have never loathed a book so much. I read every page out of a stubborn refusal to let it beat me, then put it high up on a back shelf so I'd never have to see

I have never loathed a book so much. I read every page out of a stubborn refusal to let it beat me, then put it high up on a back shelf so I'd never have to see it again. It's not that there was nothing of value in it. Sure, there is! It's more that the return on investment just wasn't worth it. My experience was like walking through a desert to find a candy bar. Even if it's a good candy bar, that's way too much of a hassle to go through to get it. I do hugely appreciate Standard Ebooks, though. Such a wonderful project!

julianeon 2y ago
As I was reading I felt like my 'visibility' at any given time was only like 1-1.5 pages into the past. Sometimes less. Meaning the context for what I was reading, my understanding, went back about that far. So I basically experienced it as "word soup" with some identifiable parts in like the last page, that I could sort-of kind-of divine a narrative from, somewhat.
AlbertCory 2y ago
Same. I actually took a course on Ulysses, taught by a guy who's been teaching it for 50 years. So that's about as ideal a reading experience as you can have. Verdict: meh. Revolutionary for its time, maybe (100 years ago).
- bowsamic 2y ago
  100 years ago is very recent
block_dagger 2y ago
I had the exact same experience. Struggled through it, searched hard for the genius that was supposedly exuding from the pages. I didn't see any of it and I don't remember a lick of the story. I was simply bored. Perhaps I'm not intellectual enough to "get it."
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Same, same. I'm an avid reader. I don't shy away from complex literature. I also don't take great pleasure from overcomplication. Computing analogy: It's like seeing that someone wrote "fizzbuzz" using a microservice architecture, quantum computing, multiple LLMs, and some custom hardware. Bravo! Cool that you pulled it off and made this monstrosity! I don't want to use it though, nor do I care to see the details of every bizarre choice, and I'm not impressed at the number of references to COBOL that you shoved into the diode layouts of the CPU you invented for it. I can see why other people would find it fascinating. I am not one of them.
klik99 2y ago
Everyone I know who loves it also has a scholarly level of knowledge about fiction so I suspect it has a lot of requisites to fully enjoy, like having to know a lot about american media to enjoy arrested development. I've been wanting to give it another go since I didn't enjoy or finish it last time, and my favorite book of all time (Wolfes Book of the New Sun) took three false starts to really get into it.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I've harbored a wholly unsupported, yet persistent, notion that no one really likes Ulysses, but that it's become an "emperor has no clothes" situation, where those who decide which books are "great" picked it on a lark, and dared others to say they didn't like it, knowing that none would lest they appear as the rube who couldn't appreciate great literature, resulting in a lineage of thinkers who encountered the beast, read it in horror, then told their colleagues about how much they loved it because obviously it's the brilliantest work of English, all while secretly hoping they weren't grilled too closely about it.
  - crabmusket 2y ago
    I wish I could find a kinder way to put this but... Don't you think that sounds like something an Ayn Rand villain would do? Having not read Ulysses, nor having ever moved in the kind of circles where many if any acquaintances had, I can't really vouch for whether it has any specific literary value. Not am I really that interested in finding out for myself, from what I do know of it. But the idea that there's some grand cultural conspiracy behind it sounds just a little bit paranoid. I don't mean to attack you personally, I don't know you and if I had more time I'd write a more sensitive post. I just wanted to make the Rand connection because I see little mention of her villains when she's brought up, and your post reminded me of them so strongly!
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Hah, I could live with being a Rand villain. I suspect it’d be closer to a David Foster Wallace kind of subplot though. I don’t actually think that’s what happened. However, if it came out that it did, I wouldn’t be entirely shocked. It’d be less “I knew it!” and more “huh, that explains a lot”.
j7ake 2y ago
It’s a good one for ebook. Read it once and never touch it again.
jderick 2y ago
For me, Joyce is the pinnacle of the English language. I can't say I understand too much of what is happening but noone writes more beautifully. I just love the sound of his words and the images he conjures.
- wozniacki 2y ago
  > no one writes more beautifully Whats this obsession with beauty in language among some English-first speakers? Aren't meaning, insight and import of more consequence than beauty? Every single time I hear someone wax poetic about beauty and elegance in things it immediately sets off my bs meter. If you haven't got much of anything substantive to say, you use flowery artifices to mask it. Also non-English-first speakers, do you see this to be a very English-thing or is this sort of fixation if not fetish with beauty in language and other things present in your current day language too?
  - vidarh 2y ago
    This happens in every language. I'm Norwegian, and there's an old Danish translation of Whitman I much prefer over the English original, not for ease of reading (Norwegian and Danish are close to mutually intelligible without much effort) but because the translation is beautiful. I wish I could remember the edition. There are books I prefer in one language or other. English tends to feel like it has a "darker" texture to me (no, it makes no logical sense) and so the same book - Lord of the Rings is an example I've read in both English and Norwegian - will hit me very differently emotionally depending on language. Sometimes I'll read something just for the beauty of it. Other times I just want to get at the ideas.
  - aaplok 2y ago
    I feel the same way about reading beautiful language that I feel about reading a beautiful mathematical proof. It's not that it doesn't have substance, it's that the substance is put together in such such an elegant way that you don't just marvel at the content but also at its presentation. It is very different, indeed possibly the opposite of a show off of cleverness. It is beautiful because it feels that it's just the right way to do it.
newhaus1994 2y ago
"Oxen of the Sun" is, in a sense, the apex of English literature to me. The modernists had a knack for essentially believing that if they just tried hard enough and wrote with enough complexity, they could capture essential truths about existence, and this chapter is the height of Joyce's effort in that regard. It is a chapter both about and structured like the birth and evolution of language, incorporating a density of reference and linguistic type that is somewhat absurd in its breadth. This is all to say that Ulysses is a book written for people who like the idea of a Rube Goldberg machine of literature. I happen to be one of those people, but there are brilliant literary scholars who hate the book.

julianeon 2y ago

As I was reading I felt like my 'visibility' at any given time was only like 1-1.5 pages into the past. Sometimes less. Meaning the context for what I was reading, my understanding, went back about that far. So I basically experienced it as "word soup" with some identifiable parts in like the last page, that I could sort-of kind-of divine a narrative from, somewhat.

AlbertCory 2y ago

Same. I actually took a course on Ulysses, taught by a guy who's been teaching it for 50 years. So that's about as ideal a reading experience as you can have. Verdict: meh. Revolutionary for its time, maybe (100 years ago).

bowsamic 2y ago
100 years ago is very recent

block_dagger 2y ago

I had the exact same experience. Struggled through it, searched hard for the genius that was supposedly exuding from the pages. I didn't see any of it and I don't remember a lick of the story. I was simply bored. Perhaps I'm not intellectual enough to "get it."

kstrauser 2y ago
Same, same. I'm an avid reader. I don't shy away from complex literature. I also don't take great pleasure from overcomplication. Computing analogy: It's like seeing that someone wrote "fizzbuzz" using a microservice architecture, quantum computing, multiple LLMs, and some custom hardware. Bravo! Cool that you pulled it off and made this monstrosity! I don't want to use it though, nor do I care to see the details of every bizarre choice, and I'm not impressed at the number of references to COBOL that you shoved into the diode layouts of the CPU you invented for it. I can see why other people would find it fascinating. I am not one of them.

klik99 2y ago

Everyone I know who loves it also has a scholarly level of knowledge about fiction so I suspect it has a lot of requisites to fully enjoy, like having to know a lot about american media to enjoy arrested development. I've been wanting to give it another go since I didn't enjoy or finish it last time, and my favorite book of all time (Wolfes Book of the New Sun) took three false starts to really get into it.

kstrauser 2y ago
I've harbored a wholly unsupported, yet persistent, notion that no one really likes Ulysses, but that it's become an "emperor has no clothes" situation, where those who decide which books are "great" picked it on a lark, and dared others to say they didn't like it, knowing that none would lest they appear as the rube who couldn't appreciate great literature, resulting in a lineage of thinkers who encountered the beast, read it in horror, then told their colleagues about how much they loved it because obviously it's the brilliantest work of English, all while secretly hoping they weren't grilled too closely about it.
- crabmusket 2y ago
  I wish I could find a kinder way to put this but... Don't you think that sounds like something an Ayn Rand villain would do? Having not read Ulysses, nor having ever moved in the kind of circles where many if any acquaintances had, I can't really vouch for whether it has any specific literary value. Not am I really that interested in finding out for myself, from what I do know of it. But the idea that there's some grand cultural conspiracy behind it sounds just a little bit paranoid. I don't mean to attack you personally, I don't know you and if I had more time I'd write a more sensitive post. I just wanted to make the Rand connection because I see little mention of her villains when she's brought up, and your post reminded me of them so strongly!
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Hah, I could live with being a Rand villain. I suspect it’d be closer to a David Foster Wallace kind of subplot though. I don’t actually think that’s what happened. However, if it came out that it did, I wouldn’t be entirely shocked. It’d be less “I knew it!” and more “huh, that explains a lot”.

j7ake 2y ago

It’s a good one for ebook. Read it once and never touch it again.

jderick 2y ago

For me, Joyce is the pinnacle of the English language. I can't say I understand too much of what is happening but noone writes more beautifully. I just love the sound of his words and the images he conjures.

wozniacki 2y ago
> no one writes more beautifully Whats this obsession with beauty in language among some English-first speakers? Aren't meaning, insight and import of more consequence than beauty? Every single time I hear someone wax poetic about beauty and elegance in things it immediately sets off my bs meter. If you haven't got much of anything substantive to say, you use flowery artifices to mask it. Also non-English-first speakers, do you see this to be a very English-thing or is this sort of fixation if not fetish with beauty in language and other things present in your current day language too?
- vidarh 2y ago
  This happens in every language. I'm Norwegian, and there's an old Danish translation of Whitman I much prefer over the English original, not for ease of reading (Norwegian and Danish are close to mutually intelligible without much effort) but because the translation is beautiful. I wish I could remember the edition. There are books I prefer in one language or other. English tends to feel like it has a "darker" texture to me (no, it makes no logical sense) and so the same book - Lord of the Rings is an example I've read in both English and Norwegian - will hit me very differently emotionally depending on language. Sometimes I'll read something just for the beauty of it. Other times I just want to get at the ideas.
- aaplok 2y ago
  I feel the same way about reading beautiful language that I feel about reading a beautiful mathematical proof. It's not that it doesn't have substance, it's that the substance is put together in such such an elegant way that you don't just marvel at the content but also at its presentation. It is very different, indeed possibly the opposite of a show off of cleverness. It is beautiful because it feels that it's just the right way to do it.

newhaus1994 2y ago

"Oxen of the Sun" is, in a sense, the apex of English literature to me. The modernists had a knack for essentially believing that if they just tried hard enough and wrote with enough complexity, they could capture essential truths about existence, and this chapter is the height of Joyce's effort in that regard. It is a chapter both about and structured like the birth and evolution of language, incorporating a density of reference and linguistic type that is somewhat absurd in its breadth. This is all to say that Ulysses is a book written for people who like the idea of a Rube Goldberg machine of literature. I happen to be one of those people, but there are brilliant literary scholars who hate the book.