Is "Ulysses" by James Joyce worth reading?

Pfft! I read it forwards and backwards. On the subway.

An outline of the structure and allusions and whatnot is helpful. I did a heavy skim of it once with an outline. I can see what the fuss was. Is?

Spoiler Alert!

She said “Yes.”

Didn’t Kate Bush write songs about that?

I thought Kate Bush wrote songs about Wuthering Heights.

She did. But I thought the sensual world was about Ulysses.

I really liked the part where Ulysses blinds the Cyclops.

Never resonated with me. Always thought it was overwrought and basically meaningless. I think at the time it got a lot of attention because of the sex but the sex wasn't interesting. Never try to read Finnegan's Wake. If you're going to read steam of consciousness, Faulkner's far more interesting.

Strangely, I do love Joyce's The Dubliners short stories. He should have stuck with that.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was best, I thought.

I am pretty high, but is this the one with everything happening on one day and they celebrate that day in London?

Technically you can celebrate it anywhere, R10.

I loved it—read it twice in grad school for different courses. “Dubliners” (especially “the Dead” is still my favorite Joyce.

No.

The Dubliners is brilliant, R8. Does that collection include the story of the high roller guy who gets loaded at a restaurant and then gets returned to his wife and children who are starving because he spends all his money on the high life?

It's a classic of the modernist movement but reading it requires dedication and patience. I echo what someone said upthread about having a guide to it--its mythological aspects stymied me when I read it at 20. I amuse myself with a sentence or two out of Finnegan's Wake every now and then; the language is musical if you just let it rip.

I agree that Joyce's early fictions are quite good. The Dead is one of my favorite short stories.

If you truly interested in stream of consciousness writing/technique V. Woolf is easier than Joyce.

You are meant to read Homer's Odyssey before starting Ulysses. This defeats most people before they get to the starting line.

OP's post made me ask myself the question: what are the "important" novels that ARE also genuinely engrossing or fun to read? In a previous thread Moby-dick received a resounding raspberry in this regard.

To be frank I enjoyed reading Gertrude Stein's modernist prose and Tender Buttons predates a lot of the experiments by male authors. I'm a gay man, by the way. I was young when I read all my modernism and it seemed so sexy and alive. I preferred Hemingway to Joyce. I guess I prefer a light touch. Now I am old. I listened to Colin Farrell's recent audio book of A Portrait of the Artist... and enjoyed it.

I have read it, and OP, don't bother. You sound far too stupid to attempt this book.

Yes, this book is everything they say it is. The greatest novel of the 20th century.

I read it in college, and while I'm sure I missed the boat in many regards trying to understand it, it moved me greatly. It felt like Joyce had peered into my own brain and put the melange there into words but using someone else's story. I felt understood in some way and less alone after reading it.

I should give it another go. I've revisited other books that marked me in my youth, and it's always been worth it. Getting older's no picnic, but one advantage is you get seasoned in a way that life takes on more depth.

Too inside-baseball for me. Life’s too short.

Life’s too short to not read the greatest novel of the 20th century.

It’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

Yes. It’s brilliant, exasperating and requires a discipline and dedication.

I agree r21, I was sure to read “1984,” and it’s amazing.

It's excellent, R24. It's not "Ulysses," but I guess that's good enough for you.

You referred to the greatest novel of the 20th century, so I agreed with you. Of course 1984 isn’t Ulysses, I don’t think there’s any controversy there.

I've read both "1984" and "Ulysses," and both are great and both are important. "Ulysses" is the stand-alone most important and greatest novel of its century. "In Search of Lost Time" is probably second, though I'm partial to "The Magic Mountain."

I always wonder about unnecessarily nasty posters like R18. What must be going on in their lives that they get some pleasure by issuing completely unprovoked attacks against other posters? 🤔

We can think such thoughts but don't need to share them.

R29 Sure, tell that to protagonist in Ulysses!

R24 "1984" was a very well-done novel and one I never wanted to see, read, or hear about again once I finished it and it had time to sink in. The feeling of dread and horror that novel invoked was so extreme that I actually deleted the book from my Kindle account some time after I finished, so I didn't have to keep revisiting those feelings each time I scrolled past it.

I suppose that's the sign of a brilliant work of art.

Don't Americans get chicer bragging rights for reading À la recherche du temps perdu in French or Anna Karenina in Russian? The sexiest intellectual boy on my campus was an Irish American cocky but charming prick who read Divina Commedia in Italian and wrote his thesis on it. Epic poetry - now that's something!

OP

Thank you, r33!

R32 you would definitely get bragging rights, but first you have to speak those other languages, fluently.

I couldn’t get through it. It wasn’t on the syllabus for any of my classes in college but I tried to read it anyway, and failed. It requires a lot of dedication which I didn’t have back then considering the other classes and reading I needed to do. Maybe I could try it again as an Eldergay, to stimulate my brain. I suspect it will just muddy it though haha.

Is it cheating if you read it with a literature guide (like an annotated Ulysses, which I assume exists)?

You probably don't want the approval of the people who would call that "cheating," R36.

Another on the plus side: you will have no problem checking this out from the library. In fact, you may be the only one who has checked it out in a while.

Yes, don't the academics spend all day working on books like "Spider Man and the Post-postmodern Singularity"?

If you want to read it, please use whatever guide or teacher that helps. It's standard procedure and even advisable.

R36, I highly recommend that you do and I think it would help pretty much anybody reading Ulysses understand and appreciate it more.

This one looks good.

It's on my shelf of unread books along with; To The Lighthouse, The Waves, and all of Proust. My shelf of shame.

I am a third of the way through Proust (English translation). I just got through Robert's gay bashing. And I understand that my reward for getting to the last two volumes is long homophobic rants?

[quote]Is "Ulysses" by James Joyce worth reading?

I prefer the Audible version read by Leslie Jordan.

Check out Hugh Kenner's short book on *Ulysses* to be astonished at some of the incredibly sneaky and smart things that Joyce concealed in that novel. Your appreciation for Joyce's genius will increase exponentially.

I don't think anyone doubts Joyce's genius. The question is whether or not the last two books are worth the effort required to get his jokes.

They aren't "jokes." *Ulysses* is a very deep and human book about what it means to be alive. Yes, sure, it's "too much work" for most people to bother with. Most people are pretty fucking ignorant of the possibilities of being human. It's a pity but it's true. Kenner's book is at pains to demonstrate how the complexities of the novel adumbrate and reinforce those complexities. The book is a work of genius, maybe the greatest novel that's ever been written. It's not for the willfully ignorant or the lazy.

Finnegan's Wake is jokes though. Just foreign language puns IIRC.

^It's "Finnegans", no apostrophe. Work on getting past the 1st word in the book and then get back to me about what it means.

Riverrun past go fuck yourself.

That was two and I even had them memorized. Again, nobody doubts Joyce's genius. His ongoing relevance in a degraded world however is in question.

Definitely worth reading, one of the great novels all time. BUT it takes some preparation beforehand to understand all the allusions, Irish history, etc. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. I do prefer Faulkner for stream-of-consciousness, however.

I had to get a companion book to help me read Ulysses. Pathetic. And it didn’t really help.

If you want a good intro to Joyce, start here with some letters to/from his wife.

[quote]His ongoing relevance in a degraded world however is in question.

He wrote it during the most horrific war the world had ever seen by that time. It's pretty relevant to "a degraded world"--in many ways it's all about that.

In fact, the literary movement of which critics place Joyce at the center , literary modernism, is all about the horrors and difficulties of living in a degraded world.

I know about modernism. The degradation I referred to is mostly that of the capabilities and interests of what is left of the reading public.

R54, seems he was really into farts.

Most people are just proud to get through Infinite Just, much less FinneganS freaking Wake.

Jest obviously

I read it in college - as a part of one of the best courses I ever took: “Yeats, Joyce, Beckett.”

I think that’s the best way to read it - I would have never finished it, much less understood it, with the guidance of the professor and the class.$

I think Joyce’s work declines from his initial Jim burst of sheer brilliance in “Dubliners.”

After that, Portrait is very good - but not as perfect as Dubliners.

Ulysses is a mix of genius and silly word games - and nobody should waste their time on Finnegan’s Wake.

Just watch the 1967 film version. Free on Vimeo!

r60 Great response...:The Dead" is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing in English.

Better watch out R60, somebody already zinged me for putting an apostrophe in Finnegans.

Yup.

[quote] The feeling of dread and horror that novel invoked was so extreme that I actually deleted the book from my Kindle account some time after I finished, so I didn't have to keep revisiting those feelings each time I scrolled past it.

MARY!!!

I read it once. It is readable. Interesting to me b/c of the stream of consciousness narration, the commentary on Catholicism and Irish society, and the really wonderful word-play, which I think very much influenced e.g., Lucy Ellmann.

No real desire to read it again.

Finnegans Wake SHOULD have an apostrophe, as there is a wake for a man named Finnegan.

Unlike Howards End where there is no Howard.

[quote] I don't think anyone doubts Joyce's genius

Virginia Woolf and myself do.

We discard Joyce.

[quote] His ongoing relevance in a degraded world however is in question.

That 'degraded' world of 1922 is on the brink of disintegration in 2022.

Well, yeah, the two super bitches of the universe did, R68....

The Dead is a brilliant short story. The movie was also very good.

Was James Joyce a good Catholic?

[quote] and the really wonderful word-play, which I think very much influenced e.g., Lucy Ellmann.

Given that her father the late Richard Ellmann was one of the most famous Joyce critics and biographers of all time, you're absolutely right.

r68, Woolf had very mixed feelings about Joyce's writing. She did not "discard" him, though she thought he was vulgar.

According to Wikipedia he refused to pray for his dying mother or take communion with her.

Well he was an atheist, right?

Doesn't that make sense?

Joyce was raised Catholic, and thought as a child he should become a Jesuit priest. Later he decided to lapse from the Church, though he spent the rest of his life still obsessed with it, and was hugely superstitious (he was terrified of thunderstorms, for example, and would run in a panic into buildings if one sprang up while he was outside).