Ulysses – James Joyce, 1922 ★★½

Greeker than the Greeks

Just because I respect Ulysses doesn’t mean I have to like reading it.

For nearly a hundred years, it has been one of the world’s most influential books. Also, one of the most confusing. What is it about? How is one supposed to feel at its end? Is the whole novel about ignoring context and focusing on form, or favoring feeling over sight?

Who is M’Intosh? Am I wrong not to care?

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce, 1916 ★★★½

A Portrait of Many Parts

There were times reading A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man where I was convinced that this was not only a great novel, but the greatest ever written in the whole history of mankind.

Other times, I felt it wasn’t even very good.

Still, consider this not only an appreciation of a literary cornerstone, but a recommendation. A Portrait Of The Artist is well worth your time. Just be aware that it goes on some wide tangents and gets a bit preachy.

Dubliners – James Joyce, 1914 ★★★★★

The Stuff of Life

Short-story collections come in all types. Some are hodgepodges, some genre exercises, some focus on specific characters. Then there are the stories of Dubliners, connected by both a setting and something less a theme than a tone.

Call it a concept album in prose.

That is one of the amazing things about Dubliners, how James Joyce crafts a unified tone poem while the stories themselves traverse all kinds of territory. Not geographic territory – it’s all happening in Dublin – but territory of the soul.

Selected Poems And Two Plays – William Butler Yeats, 1962 ★★★★

Perning in the Gyres with W. B.

I have always loved reading. I have never cared for poetry. It is like spinach or broccoli on my reading plate, except I actually love spinach and broccoli. May I add I’m not keen on metaphors, either?

With poetry, it comes down to being a born skimmer. I find myself reading at angles, grasping at words like Tarzan swinging from vines, never working line-by-line and seldom methodically. Scansion might as well be a Swedish engineering firm for all I care. For reader as well as composer, poetry demands fine concentration. Ruined perhaps by decades of television, I find such concentration unpleasant.