5. Ulysses - James Joyce

Well, you can tell by the number on this one that I started this much earlier in the year. In fact I started it twice (this year). It proved to be quite a challenge to get through. But I've finished it, and it seems like such an accomplishment in some ways.

I've left my initial thoughts below - at the bottom of this post (quoted). It'll probably take me a while to get my thoughts together on this one. I don't think I've ever been stretched by a book like this one. I was talking about it to a friend the other day, and I ended up saying "I wouldn't recommend anyone read it, but I'd recommend that everyone read it!". Maybe it's brought the Irish out in me? :D

A couple of favourite quotes:

BLOOM: (Meaningfully dropping his voice) I confess I'm teapot with curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a little teapot at present.

MRS BREEN: (Gushingly) Tremendously teapot! London's teapot and I'm simply teapot all over me. (She rubs sides with him.) After the parlour mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.

Crazy stuff. Almost nonsensical. Some sections are *truly* challenging though (this not being an example of such). But the episode this is taken from is difficult (not to mention the enormous vocabulary employed throughout)...


But you come across gems like this:

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Haha. See?


Towards the end of the book especially around Episode 15 Circe, and Episode 17 Ithica, I was pretty convinced I might throw the book against the nearest wall upon completion. But when I came to the last page, and after my eyes had run off the last sentence and had stopped jittering around the page I just put it down and said something as unoriginal as "O.K.". I was almost shaking to read the last page. I don't know how I feel now. I feel a bit depressed I think.

Anyway, I'll have to put more into this post. The book is so worthy. It's a book that is contemporaneously the most dull and the most vivid and beautiful thing I've tried to wrap my mind around. I think it's amazing and beautiful and incredible and worth gushing over.


Nascent thoughts not long after starting it at the end of January (the first time).

"An invaluable resource in trying to get the most out of "Ulysses" by James Joyce.

The language and breadth of writing techniques in this book in unparalleled in anything I've ever read, and am likely to read in the future (I should think).

It's all thoroughly overwhelming, and would probably take a year of study to appreciate properly, and even then you'd be living with gaps."