Literary Open Run-Off • December 2012

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

I doubt it's a bomb. Good books aren't good for everyone at every point in their life. Although I have my doubts about Joyce.

Funny that you mention Joyce since I'm reading Ulysses right now.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

Funny that you mention Joyce since I'm reading Ulysses right now.

It's a masterpiece!

[HomeInMyShoes]

^It's certainly something. I read it last year. Parts were very fun, parts very irritating. I read Artist this year and I think I'm done with Joyce now.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

^It's certainly something. I read it last year. Parts were very fun, parts very irritating. I read Artist this year and I think I'm done with Joyce now.

Try his short story collection The Dubliners, before you leave him altogether {assuming you haven't already read the collection}.

[HomeInMyShoes]

It's not that I hate Joyce, but reading him feels like a million monkeys to me. Just throw a lot of words on the page and something amongst them has to be good. I can understand the interest with allegory, metaphor, and allusion being so important to the writing, but so much of it is just so daft boring. It's something to study, not to actually sit and enjoy, unless of course one is an English Literature major. I'm not. That's probably where the disconnect is. I plead guilt of ignorance and will go back to reading cereal boxes.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

It's not that I hate Joyce, but reading him feels like a million monkeys to me. Just throw a lot of words on the page and something amongst them has to be good. I can understand the interest with allegory, metaphor, and allusion being so important to the writing, but so much of it is just so daft boring. It's something to study, not to actually sit and enjoy, unless of course one is an English Literature major. I'm not. That's probably where the disconnect is. I plead guilt of ignorance and will go back to reading cereal boxes.

I think your criticism is quite justified in Finnegan's Wake which is so loaded with allusively heavy language as to be almost incomprehensible. But in The Dubliners Joyce creates a series of dark, often poignant portraits of Dublin life. The longest, "The Dead" is in some ways an elegiac study of the end of an era and a culture. One thing about them, though, is that the stories while gritty and pessimistic do have a kind of wisdom that comes from a deep perception of the human condition.

The portraits may not be very pleasant but they are beautifully written, accessible and worth exploring {eventually }.

[spindlegirl]

I just started reading Year of Wonders last night. Looks like a good read.