I rated this book fairly high (four stars) for the quality of the writing and highly descriptive scene and character development. It may be a contradiction to state that I did not really enjoy most of the stories and found them not fulfilling. One reason is, as I mentioned before, for a book by Joyce titled Dubliners I did not feel like any of the stories or the collection as a whole transported me to the Dublin of the early 20th Century. There was little in any of the stories that I could see made them unique to Dublin.

I also agree with the assessment that it was a gray cold book. Often the stories ended with little hope but for a bleak future forecast any without any indication whether things would improve, stay the same or get worse.

In The Counterparts the central character Farrington is a lazy drunk who takes out his frustration at being in a well justified dead end life by physically abusing his son. The story just ends abruptly at that point.

At other times the stories just seem to ramble on to no particular point as in A Mother. It read like an episode of what might now be reality television, but with no past to introduce it or future to come it was difficult to have any interest in it all.

On the other hand for The Dead that almost to the end seemed as much a rambling pointless tale the story was redeemed by its powerful ending.

I'm mainly glad that The Dubliners was selected as the book for December because it gave me a chance to read a work of Joyce that I at least found accessible. Ulysses being the only other book of Joyce I have read.