Anyone interested in tackling Ulysses in 2014 would benefit greatly from Frank Delaney's ongoing Re:Joyce podcast, in which he "unpacks" the book a paragraph or so at a time. He's been at it for three and a half years and is almost through "Calypso", the fourth chapter. That's an advantage for a first-time reader, as it gets you through the (deliberately ponderous and self-indulgent) "Proteus" stretch in Book I. http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/ Ulysses is a singular book: Well-worth it if you love language, or for that matter almost anything about life as it is lived.
I managed to struggle my way through Ulysses, which at least has some semblance of narrative structure and mostly uses actual English words, but Wells is commenting on Finnegans Wake, which is thoroughly impenetrable. Here's the second paragraph: Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen- core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from…
I hated it the first time I tried. Every seven or ten years I’d give it a shot and decide it’s not worth trying or finishing. But it has its charms for sure, which had drawn me back to it over the years since because maybe I was wrong or not ready. It was like my fourth or fifth attempt like six years ago (at 32) where it clicked. Honestly love it now. The trick is to let go of this notion that Ulysses is some kind of schoolboy challenge. You have to let it wash over you, allow the language to intoxicate you mind. You need to be in an altered state where you are more open to symbolism in…
Anna Karenina is a classical novel that follows classical literary conventions. It's heavy and will give your understanding of Russian naming a workout, but it's still basically readable. Ulysses, on the other hand, is hundreds and hundreds of pages of modernist stream of consciousness, from the point of view of many characters who don't believe in providing context, where every sentence is packed full of complicated wordplay and obscure allusions, and everything happens at a snail's pace. If the idea of reading a book where you literally can't understand half of it gives you pause,…
You might enjoy On Moral Fiction by John Gardner, who argues that good literature is about the characters, especially their decisions and transformations, rather than cleverness in language and plot. His model is Anna Karenina, and I think it's people like Pynchon he has in mind for his critique. And he was not just a stodgy critic, but a flowering author himself. His book Grendel is short and fun---the story of Beowulf from the monster's perspective. Sadly he died young in a motorcycle accident, so we didn't get many examples of his approach. Another modern writer that I think he would have…
Yes - took 2 Joyce seminars back in college and never got through more than excerpts of FW. Funny process - at first you think Ulysses is hard, and it is, but you get used to that world. FW is dense. Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project there is even a precursor to the hyperlink in the way that links to other topics jump around the work and imply multiple connections. Things like https://mannahatta2409.org/ remind me of what Benjamin did in a way.
These books are not easy to read. They ask some work on the part of the reader. It's not entertainment. They bring much more than their story to the table, but they're way harder to read than non-fiction. What you need is time. Lots of time. I've read the complete in search of lost time novels when I was around 15. I found it easy to read because I had nothing else to do. And I am plenty sure it changed a lot of things for me. I've been reading the Magic Mountain and Ulysses for 10 years, unable to finish them yet, but I don't feel it's a problem. Just as you, if I try again time after…
I love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite explanations for literary fiction’s decline that have been pushed by its adherents (“the internet made people stupid”) to really try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore. His point that people still read challenging literary fiction, just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN’s recent discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good writers who wanted to actually earn a…
I agree that the possibilities are endless. The difficulty, for me, comes in bridging the linguistic legacy of the literary canon, with all of its caveats and forms, to the world of coding. You’ve (very helpfully) identified a narrative structure that revolves around the transition to open source. The question then becomes whether or not this is a more vital narrative than any good vs. evil tale writ large. It will remain very difficult to make the character’s computer based vocation more engaging than orcs or jedis, or what have you. I realize that this quibble is secondary to my original…
I have sympathy for the lady (and others) who lost their Kindle books. However, I am going to take the opposition view here because I feel like people don't understand 'the beast' also known as Amazon. Amazon optimizes on low margins, and cheap prices for goods (both physical and electronic). Amazon optimizes on the benefit to the mass majority of their customers at the expense of a small minority who do occasionally get "thrown under the bus." I buy lots of Kindle books, but there are a few things I do to mitigate risk. First, for technical books I try to buy from publishers who have…