Well no, you don't have to be a genius or a scholar to have a good time reading this book, I'm just a primary school teacher. See my successive blog posts as I work my way through each chapter.
Intro: http://tinyurl.com/ykxc9wx
Ch 1, 2 & 3: http://tinyurl.com/ykrzhh6
Ch 4: http://tinyurl.com/lo7ghe
Ch 5: http://tinyurl.com/ykgzkn8
Ch 6: http://tinyurl.com/yjx42om
Ch 7: http://tinyurl.com/yfldo3t
Ch 8: http://tinyurl.com/ybr8k6j
Ch 9: http://tinyurl.com/yko7z4z
Then (switching to a newer edition of the same book)
Ch 10: http://tinyurl.com/yjno2zj
Ch 11: http://tinyurl.com/yadlj9y
More to come, I'm not giving up, not when I'm having such fun...
See the rest as I do them at http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com and click on the Disordered Thoughts of an Amateur tag in the RH menu. ( )

Well no, you don't have to be a genius or a scholar to have a good time reading this book, I'm just a primary school teacher. See my successive blog posts as I work my way through each chapter.
Intro: http://tinyurl.com/ykxc9wx
Ch 1, 2 & 3: http://tinyurl.com/ykrzhh6
Ch 4: http://tinyurl.com/lo7ghe
Ch 5: http://tinyurl.com/ykgzkn8
Ch 6: http://tinyurl.com/yjx42om
Ch 7: http://tinyurl.com/yfldo3t
Ch 8: http://tinyurl.com/ybr8k6j
Ch 9: http://tinyurl.com/yko7z4z
Then (switching to a newer edition of the same book)
Ch 10: http://tinyurl.com/yjno2zj
Ch 11: http://tinyurl.com/yadlj9y
More to come, I'm not giving up, not when I'm having such fun...
See the rest as I do them at http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com and click on the Disordered Thoughts of an Amateur tag in the RH menu. ( )

I fell asleep, head into book, multiple times while trying to read this. I have no idea why people think this is one of the best books of all time. It was boring and confusing. It gave me a headache trying to decipher what was happening, especially since Joyce apparently doesn't enjoy proper punctuation - like quotations marks. He also seems to hate the concept of paragraphs and will run on in one large block of text for more than 5 pages sometimes. Dreadful. ( )

Ulysses is a classic depiction of literary excellence and narrative fashion.

A story of an uncivilized and crude man "Buck Mulligan" who plays down his mother's death and sensational representation of gestation period of human and embryonic development.
Realization of facing trial of sins and vices like forgery, bigamy, adultery & fornication and in heavenly court, imagination of conversing with nymph and asking her about her sexual attitude after death.
lots of scenes, conversation, and dialog which are really remarkable and their expressions par-excellence, including great imagination, research. ( )

There are MILLIONS of books you should read before this one!

I'm presently about 60% through the Kindle version after reading Pat Conroy's rating (in South of Broad) of Ulysses as "the worst book ever written." Joyce certainly has a way with words but to fully appreciate this work one must be a scholar in the classics and fluent in Latin, ancient Greek, French, Italian and late 1900s Dublin slang, at least. Who has that?

Lo he tenido que abandonar porque mi inglés no daba suficientemente de si. De momento sigue como asignatura pendiente.

Lo he tenido que abandonar porque mi inglés no daba suficientemente de si. De momento sigue como asignatura pendiente.

I'm obviously a bit biased but I think this is the greatest book ever written, and that it subsumes everything that came before it and almost everything that came afterwards (except Finnegan's Wake). Style. It's got it. And a lot of people miss the content too; there's some great philosophical concepts that get worked out in Bloom's mind and lots of interesting aesthetic implications throughout. Also, this is a masterpiece of Realism, and that's an amazing feat considering the stylistic adventures. ( )

My favorite Irishman. How could I ever write like this? ( )

Yes, I have read this, and I'm glad I did, but it wasn't easy. I had the advantage of the relatively open schedule of the undergraduate, and I was determined. He is a towering genius, and I get to feel pretty smug when the tltle comes up on all those must-read, all-time great novel lists. Thanks, Dr. Kershner at UF! ( )

Look, you wouldn’t try and climb Everest or run a marathon without making some preparations, would you? So, don’t attempt Ulysses casually, thinking it’s only a matter of reading nine hundred odd pages. Find out as much as you can about it before you start. You’ll appreciate what you read more and you’ll have more chance of reaching the end. This text is rich, dense, complex and confusing. You’ll need a guide and Declan Kiberd’s “Ulysses and Us” is excellent.

Ulysses took me three and half weeks to read and I can’t say that much of it was pleasurable in the normal manner of reading a book. Nevertheless, it is an astonishing and important piece of literature and I’m glad I’ve tackled it. I’m sure that there are a lot of allusions and ideas that I have totally missed, that I just hadn’t got the learning to appreciate.

But, even so, this is a far from barren read for the ordinary reader. More than anything, it is the very depth and complexity of the work that is the most awe inspiring aspect. It's much like viewing a challenging piece of artwork, you are going to come away impressed and possibly haunted rather than in love. ( )

happy bloomsday: this is such a wonderful book writen by the one of the most talented writers to have ever lived. this review, i think, is directed to the people who are interested in reading it...
if you want to read ulysses, don't. instead find out everything you can about it, then read it. no one gets through it the first time grasping what is going on. also, feel free to jump around, the more readable sections include circe(written like a play), ithica (question and answer) and nausica (style overload), and peneolpe is just so beautiful that it's a good place to start also because there's no punctuation it's a good intro in the respect it shows you how you have to work to read the stream of consciouness sections but once you catch on it is a breeze.
the stuart gilbert study is fascinating also and a great help...he knew joyce and translated the book into french, was among the first to identify the major structures and had his ideas confirmed by joyce personally.
you've got to want to read this book, which i think is great, also i feel like regardless of who you are, by the third read it's fairly clear, by the fourth you've got it like understanding people speaking another language and that being understanding not translating in your head. some sections are still difficult; aeolus is boring no matter how many times you read it and oxen in the sun is so packed with slang the action is difficult but the language is entertaining...etc. but a great example of things buried in the book is there is plenty to suggest that in the forementioned oxen in the sun section that bloom unwittingly gives a condom to a man who most likely uses the very same condom to deflower bloom's own daughter...the book is loaded with the stuff.
it helps if you know irish history. don't be afraid to read it out loud, it'll help.
and what else?
those people who say this is unreadable are people who haven't read it.

Writing about Ulysses is akin to writing about a long, cross continent trip, complete with moments of peril, relaxing rest stops, inscrutable natives, the like. I set off on this grand trek thinking that I was up for the challenge, and something like six months after I had started I finally found myself at the final page. Ulysses lived up to its reputation as one of the most difficult novels to finish, and had I not brought along a guide in the form of the Bloomsday book I probably would have ended up getting lost somewhere in the middle and given up.

A month after finishing, I'm still not sure whether or not I enjoyed myself. Reading it as a novel I think I didn't, but as a collection of serialized shorts collected in book form I think I did. If approached as a grand experiment and exercise to be picked at and read in patches the process of reading feels more natural than making an attempt cover to cover like I did. It's fun to see how Joyce plays with the English language and literary forms, but at the same time his experimentation often results in the very antithesis of graceful prose. As inscrutable as his writing seems to be at times his characters are transparent and endearing. Even if I come to the decision that no, I did not like Ulysses a year from now, I will still be a big fan of Leopold Bloom.

Ultimately I am noting Ulysses at two point three stars. Dead center. I both love and hate it, recommend it to people who like a challenge and want to explore the limits of human expression, and warn everyone to stay the hell away if they can or will not spend almost as much time looking at outside sources to understand Ulysses as they do reading the book itself. ( )

WOW!

Nuff said. ( )

A corrected text, first published in 1984 after seven years textual research. Professor Gabler and his team of scholars returned to the original manuscripts, drafts and proofs in order to reconstruct as closely as possible the creative process by which Joyce wrote "Ulysses".

I hated Ulysses...and not just because it's practically unreadable. I actually did manage to more or less read it all the way through, in one long twelve hour night, which I can never have back now. And I don't know about all the nuances and subtleties that it supposedly contains, but the basic thrust of it was clear enough.

Ulysses is basically an unbridled attack on the very ideas of heroism, romantic love and sexual fulfillment, and objective literary expression. This is made especially clear by the title's reference to The Odyssey of Homer (Ulysses being the Latin name for the Greek Odysseus)---and the unmistakably unbridgeable contrast between the two books, both in terms of the content of the stories, and their modes of expression.

Odysseus is a great man, King of Crete, husband of Penelope, father of Telemachus, and a hero of the Trojan war. The Odyssey chronicles his heroic ten-year voyage to return home from the war to his wife and son. Ulysses, on the other hand, is about an ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a bumbling buffoon, impotent both in life and in bed. In Homer's view, man is a heroic, even God-like, being---and woman is more than a match for him. In Joyce's, man is metaphysically ridiculous, especially in matters of sex, and woman is his equal in patheticalness.

And then there is the literary style Joyce employs to spew forth this sewage. While Homer's epic poem takes the form of strictly-metered verse, Joyce switches literary mode, from straight prose to dialogue to stream of consciousness (among other things), almost at random throughout the work, though it seems to degenerate more and more toward the end.

If the point of Ulysses were to break free of outmoded and arbitrary restrictions of classicism, it would be admirable. But that's not what Joyce is doing. He doesn't offer a positive alternative to replace the Homeric values (which I think are genuine values) upon which he's pissing. He's pissing on them just to piss on them. It's pure nihilism, and it's disgusting.

Ulysses is obscene, not because of any language it uses or its obsession with sex, but because of its thematic content---the ideas it conveys. The book expresses nothing less than an all-consuming hatred of man and any positive values to which he aspires. And that is why I think Ulysses is one of the most vile and evil books ever written. ( )

I loathe Ulysses the way that most sensible folks loathe the very existence of Bernie Madoff. It's an all encompassing and consuming loathing leaving no room for mercy. In fact, if I were The Blob or a Killer Tomato on the attack, I'd consume every volume of Ulysses extant (and Bernie Madoff) with my acidic, dissolving loathing. I wish the book were still banned and my access to it summarily and arbitrarily denied me by Big Brother, so that I wouldn't have wantonly wasted my precious, irreplaceable time and energy reading it, is how deep my Ulysses loathing goes.

Yes, it's true, reading Ulysses (even just half of this poo poo) feels like being disemboweled (or at least like having bad, painful gas; and that's bad, painful gas when you're stuck inside somewhere with other people and it would be too impolite and embarassing - even as painful as it is holding it in - to let it rip. Oh yeah?! You think that's tacky and tasteless? Well, if the "genius," Joyce, can make fart jokes in Ulysses left and right, why can't anybody else do the same in describing his flatulent, nauseating tome?

Worse, reading Ulysses leaves one feeling like they've been had, scammed, rused, abused, conned, pawned, Ponzi'd, cheated, excreted, duped, nuked, swindled, swizzled, diddled, belittled, hustled, hoaxed, stiffed, tricked, taken to the cleaners or taken for a ride, ripped off royally of everything you've worked hard for your whole life and hold dear. Just like Madoff! How you like that list, Joyce, you MOTHERF%$#!R?

Less painful indeed, having your wisdom teeth extracted with pliers by an orang-utang...and without novocaine, than trying to read Ulysses first page to last.

I hated it. ( )

As an unabashed Anglophile with a weakness for late 18th century and early 19th century British Isles fiction, I found the 782 pages of Ulysses pure delight. I own the 1961 Vintage Giant paperback edition of this incredible masterpiece, which I managed to read in three months (I'm a painfully slow reader), but the original edition was published in 1922. Keep in mind that Ulysses was banned in the United States after its publication and my edition, at least, includes the 1933 U.S. District Court decision that lifted its ban.

Joyce is nothing if not a lyrical poet, and his incredible insights into character and setting, particularly the internal, Modernist, stream-of-consciousness setting, is unmatched in my opinion. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

The entire story takes place in one day in 1904 (June 16, celebrated as Bloomsday by Joyce fans) to depict the wanderings of one Mr. Leopold Bloom throughout the streets of Dublin, with countless allusions to the wanderings of Odysseus. Indeed, Joyce used Homer's tripartite, episodic structure. Bloom plays Odysseus, Molly Bloom, his wife, plays Penelope, and the student Stephen Dedalus, who appears in other Joyce novels, plays Telemachus.

While the book can be enjoyed on its own, there are various guides on the market, such as The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses (US$124 at this writing), such a ponderous study would frighten the timid, so best to read it through first to capture the lyric quality, and then return if you want insight into the allusions.

If I took away anything from reading Ulysses it was that nothing rivals its supreme turn of phrase and divine detail. ( )

I've got a lot of chutzpah to review this one after only one reading. This is a writer's book, not a reader's book. I retained perhaps 80% of the plot and 25% of the rest. I read a few critical reviews prior to attempting it. It is obviously an incredible and comprehensive work. The audio version was great. I can't imagine I would have gotten through Molly's last chapter just by reading. But on audio, it was very understandable. 'Can't say the same for the previous two episodes (the maternity ward, where there are some 30 or so stylistic forms and the surreal trip to "Night Town"). 1 star for readability, 5 stars for all the unbelievable literary refernces and styles.

I'll check it out again in a couple years. Clearly, the more you read it, the more you get out of it. ( )

I usually don't write here about audiobooks; I consider listening a much different act than reading, and it occupies a different slot in my life. But hearing James Joyce's Ulysses performed aloud has been so crucial, for me, in developing a love of it, that I decided to make an exception for Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan's excellent audio rendition.

I first experienced Joyce's monumental day-in-the-life tome in the traditional ink-and-paper way, during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I found it just okay. Parts were utterly transcendent, but other parts were downright obnoxious. I liked the first few chapters, and a number of bright flashes of wit or beauty got through to me during the vast middle section, but mostly I just kept plugging along until the famous Molly Bloom monologue, when I finally felt I was in the presence of masterful, fully-realized and revolutionary writing. That soul-soaring, ecstatic feeling didn't kick in until the last seventy-five pages of an eight hundred page novel, which seemed to me to spell "uneven." (And I am not one to shy away from experimental modernism: Beckett, Camus, and Woolf are among my favorite writers.) It was frankly disappointing. I didn't find it scary or too difficult or any of that nonsense; I just thought it was a single astoundingly brilliant novella tacked onto seven hundred pages of self-important mediocrity.

And then I discovered, during a period when I was listening to more podcasts than was good for me, the recordings of the 2007 Bloomsday on Broadway celebration, a twelve-hour marathon of readings and performances from Ulysses and other Joycean ephemera. I started listening, and promptly fell in love with one of the parts that, a few years before, had struck me as completely tiresome: the "Nausicaa" episode, featuring Gertie MacDowell's (possibly imaginary) romanticizing of the world around her, including Bloom, and Bloom's orgasmic admiration of Gertie MacDowell. I don't remember who read the section, but the cadence of the spoken word added immeasurably to the experience for me. I started to cotton onto the sadness and humor of the episode, and to the complicated subjectivity at play: are we privy to Gertie's thoughts, or merely to what Bloom imagines those thoughts might be? Who is naive, and who knowing? Another little hilarity I discovered while listening to the Bloomsday recordings is the snippet of a scene when Bloom, unwillingly waylaid by an old acquaintance M'Coy, is listening to M'Coy talk (shout, really) about the recent death of a mutual friend of theirs, while Bloom attempts to ogle the legs of a young woman across the street:

--WHY? I said. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM? I said.

Proud: rich: silk stockings.

--Yes, Mr Bloom said.

He moved a little to the side of M'Coy's talking head. Getting up in a minute.

--WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM? He said. HE'S DEAD, he said. And, faith, he filled up. IS IT PADDY DIGNAM? I said. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. I was with him no later than Friday last or Thursday was it in the Arch. YES, he said. HE'S GONE. HE DIED ON MONDAY, POOR FELLOW. Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!

A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between.

Lost it. Curse your noisy pugnose. Feels locked out of it. Paradise and the peri. Always happening like that. The very moment. Girl in Eustace street hallway Monday was it settling her garter. Her friend covering the display of. ESPRIT DE CORPS. Well, what are you gaping at?

--Yes, yes, Mr Bloom said after a dull sigh. Another gone.

--One of the best, M'Coy said.

Ha! One of the best. As I listened, little gems of humor or profundity started to emerge, glimmering, from the stream of words, and transform the landscape of my relationship with Ulysses.

I gained so much, in fact, from the Bloomsday readings that David and I decided to experience the entire novel in audio form, and I'm so glad we did. Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan do an amazing job with the many, many moods and styles of Ulysses (Riordan taking Molly's voice, Norton taking everything else). There were numberless sections I hadn't liked or even particularly noticed before, which I heartily enjoyed this time around. Most notably, I think, the Cyclops episode benefits ENORMOUSLY and hilariously from being spoken aloud. The richness and texture of the colloquial language come through in a truly beautiful way, which, I think, is such a central part of the tension in this chapter: the hearty flow and cadence of the working-class Irish tongue, as contrasted (by Joyce) with the ignorance and xenophobia of the working-class Irish mind.

--What are you doing round those parts? says Joe.

--Devil a much, says I. There's a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the garrison church at the corner of Chicken lane--old Troy was just giving me a wrinkle about him--lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar to pay three bob a week said he had a farm in the county Down off a hop-of-my-thumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near Heytesbury street.

--Circumcised? says Joe.

--Ay, says I. A bit off the top. An old plumber named Geraghty. I'm hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can't get a penny out of him.

--That the lay you're on now? says Joe.

--Ay, says I. How are the mighty fallen! Collector of bad and doubtful debts. But that's the most notorious bloody robber you'd meet in a day's walk and the face on him all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain.

The Cyclops episode is an emphatic condemnation of the hypocrisy, prejudice and lack of self-awareness that Joyce perceieved in Dublin life of the period (epitomized by the citizen's statement "By Jesus, ...I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name"), yet it still manages to be funny, rich, and enjoyable to listen to or read. I just can't resist phrases like "Gob, he's not as green as he's cabbagelooking" and "God blimey if she ain't a clinker, that there bleeding tart," especially when, as here, they're juxtaposed with riotous parodies of high-minded society narratives. I'm not sure why "Cyclops" never stood out to me before, but I'm very glad to have acquired it this time around.

There are still sections of Joyce's novel that I don't like (yet), and sections I like better on the page than through the ears. I found the Proteus chapter, in which Stephen angsts poetically along the seashore, difficult to absorb at spoken speed. When reading, I tend to linger longer over passages like this one:

In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.

This language is so gorgeous, and works at so many levels: Stephen's literary preoccupations are emphasized by all the Anglo-Saxon-esque alliteration ("long lassoes," "flowed full"), and kenning-like compound words (I think "greengoldenly" is exquisite). The onomatopoeia of the sea is beautiful, and the prose rhythms reflect sometimes-unexpected movements of slapping waves: "In cups of rocks it slops." This was one of the passages that just blew me away on my first reading, but got a bit lost in the audio version.

The Ithaca section, on the other hand (the penultimate section, structured in a question-answer catechism), still strikes me, except for its final few pages, as a tiresome slog no matter which version I'm experiencing. This was reputedly Joyce's favorite chapter, but I find it totally abrasive. I must admit, though, that it provides an excellent foil for the last and always-stunning Molly Bloom monologue, with which Marcella Riordan does a GREAT job. The lovely, flowing, sleepy, sexy language is set off beautifully by her rich purr, but the performance is not overdone. She lets the lyricism and mounting rhythms do their work, and oh, they do it magnificently. As much as I adored this monologue from the first moment of contact, my love of it only grows with each successive hearing or reading.

My experience with Ulysses has been cumulative: hearing the language spoken is not better than reading it on the page, but having done both is, I think, better than either one in isolation. Ulysses is such a multifaceted piece of work that I find it very helpful to approach it from multiple directions, getting different perspectives on its contents with each new sally. Every time I enter the novel again in a slightly different way (Joycean orifice-related pun fully intended), I learn to appreciate new parts of it, and to enjoy in new ways the parts I already liked. I think really, I'm engaged in a lifelong relationship with Ulysses, and this latest installment has been a joy.

So.
Shall we?
What can I say but yes?

God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. ( )

If you want to read and enjoy the book, don't treat it as a scholarly expedition, at least not the first time through. Roughly 50% of the prose is flat out spectacular. There is a lot of bold experimentation. Some of it doesn't work out as well and can be a chore to read but, as bold experimentation, is quite interesting all the same. I least enjoyed the dramatic sequence that begins at the brothel.

The book's power to completely immerse you in a different time and place and the inner lives of a host of very different people is unsurpassed and a great pleasure, especially in conjunction with said spectacular prose.

Ulysses is chock full of interesting correspondences (biblical, mythological, Shakespearian and on and on, no doubt) but little sustained allegory. What I take away from that is, aside from the fact that we all star in and narrate our own tales, we can find correspondences with these other great narratives in our own daily lives as mundane (but important to us!) as they are. ( )

Flower of mountain/ 'Midst high Howth rhododendron/ The sun shines for you.

James Joyce's Ulysses is a touching love story, a universal story, a simple story told with a panoply of literary techniques, some avant-garde, that are used, not to display the author's wit and erudition, but to overcome the limitations of the written word. The common wisdom is that we know more about Leopold Bloom than any other character in literature. If this is so, it is because Joyce exposes multiple dimensions of his characters through his many-fold literary devices, equivalent to the richness of today's CAT scan brain images compared to the first crude X-rays of hand bone.

Bloomsday, 16 June, 1904, will be a turning point in Bloom's marriage to Molly. Madly in love at the time their marriage, Molly chose Poldy over all other suitors. Birth of a daughter, Milly, soon followed, then a son, Rudy. Rudy died in infancy, leaving a gap in their marriage that never closed. Milly is nearly old enough to leave the household, so the Blooms will be deciding how to live the rest of their lives. Not by family council, but through the unspoken communication between husband and wife, to close the gap if they can.

The entrace of another suitor, Blazes Boylan, forces the issue and presents other possible outcomes for the Blooms' future together. How does Bloom act in this changed dynamic? Will Molly choose Boylan over Bloom? Or just look for a bit on the side with Boylan, or with Stephen Dedalus. Oh yes, can't forget Dedalus. Ulysses opens with Stephen's story, and continues a major subplot with him. He is Wandering Aengus, who wanders into the life of Bloom for a day, then wanders out again. He will find his silver and golden apples elsewhere, aided, perhaps, by his encounter with Bloom.

In reading Ulysses, keep in mind these major themes, how Joyce introduces them, expands them, interconnects them, resolves them (if at all). Do this and you will likely enjoy the book, even if some of the wit and erudition of Joyce escapes you, because it is a very human story. What you may miss is not central to understanding and enjoying Ulysses and may have been included partly to edify the critics, as T.S. Eliot did in The Waste Land. Joyce's style captures the life of his characters as it is lived, while it is lived, and not as it might be edited, sanitized, and revised for the historical record. I finished the book caring very much for Poldy and Molly and wish them the best, for them to hear again the sweetest song of all . . . love's old sweet song.

Do pay attention to Joyce's prose, which is very lyrical and deserves to be heard. Speak the words to yourself, read them aloud to another, read aloud together with someone else. If you have the chance, listen to one of the audio versions of Ulysses. Aside from shifting the burden of vocalization to a professional, this also helps untangle the mid-sentence point-of-view shifts without having to stop to analyze the text yourself. Ulysses deserves the Robert Altman treatment as a movie, but, sadly, it is not to be on his agenda. ( )

I don't really know what to say—perhaps: I "read" all of it, "got" maybe half of it, "liked" less than a quarter?

For the reading, I approached it with trepidation, as words like "unreadable" and "incomprehensible" have often been bandied about. I didn't find it unreadable. It was difficult at times—the constantly changing writing styles, the profusion of pronouns instead of names, the common use of foreign languages, the...umm, irregular?...punctuation—all make this tough sledding at times, but it's difficult to read, not unreadable.

As for the getting, I think that much of the novel simply shot right past me. I'm reasonably familiar with The Odyssey and was able to follow that macro structure of the book. However, I know that much of the allusion and innuendo simply did not register in this book about which Joyce once said he "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." I understand that there are entire books...large books...devoted to explaining what is going on in Ulysses. Well and good, but that's more work than I'm willing to put into a book I didn't enjoy that much.

And, as for that, the truth is that I like stories in my stories, and I didn't enjoy Joyce as a story teller. There's no real question he's good at limning characters. There's even less doubt that the man had a command of the English language that was not short of dazzling. However, we never established a rapport with each other as writer and reader. I would find a portion of it interesting or funny and start to immerse, only to run into twice as many pages of text that I found mind-numbing in their opacity.

Does the fault lie with me? I'm willing to concede that it does simply because I cannot judge. I don't have the knowledge or training to decipher this work. I can only say much of the reported depth escaped me, evidently lost in unseen allusions and obscured by experimental writing techniques. For those familiar with Clarke's maxim on advanced technology and magic, here is my own variant: "Any literature, sufficiently abstruse, is indistinguishable from the un-profound."

In the end, I'm glad I read it so that I have an opinion rather than just hearsay. I would suggest that readers try it and decide for themselves, even if that means invoking the 50 Page Rule—it is, after all, often billed as one of the greatest books ever. However, for me it was neither moving, nor enlightening nor enjoyable. I'm content to be a cultural Philistine on this one. ( )

I wish Joyce had made this book more accessible, but would encourage people who find it too difficult to plow through the more esoteric parts. Chapter 3 represents the first difficult "barrier to further entry", hang in there, some of the middle chapters in particular (6, 11, 12, 13) are well worth it. Then again, I also love chapters 1 and 2, so if you don't like them ... well, you may not want to go on!

Joyce is showing us Irish life at the time he wrote Ulysses in the most complete way he can - giving us the full spectrum of intellectual, religious, political, and philosophical thought amidst the frailty of his characters' lives, which are pathetic in many respects. He holds nothing back - subconscious thoughts, sexual desires, private moments - because he is trying to portray life in total.

This is done in a single day with underlying parallel to the Odyssey. Here we have Bloom (Ulysses), Stephen (Telemachus), Molly (Penelope) ... but instead of their idealized forms, it is a faithless Penelope, a real son Rudy who has died, and a lecherous Ulysses. The Irish are as Greeks/Slaves/Jews, the British are as Romans/Masters/Egyptians.

And yet Stephen also parallels Parnell/Christ (and perhaps Joyce), while Bloom is an enlightened freethinker believing in tolerance, peace, and love. It's hard to conceive of these two as heroes given their shortcomings, and maybe that's what Joyce is showing: real, frail heroes in sharp contrast to those of Homer or the Bible.

I can't give it 5 stars even though it is considered one of the best books (if not *the* best book) of the 20th century because Joyce often goes too far and it can be a frustrating read. I know several who tried but put it down; one shouldn't feel a need for a study guide to read a book. On the other hand, he was pushing the form of the novel to its limits and adopted many different forms, some of which work, some of which don't ... but that's the nature of a true artist, is it not?

Favorite quotes; sorry, it's a ton of them.
On death:
"Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery. Where now? Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl".

"But in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of hearts. All for a shadow. …Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back, waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and lie no more in her warm bed".

"The clay fell softer. Begin to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind".

"Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat. Human life".

"The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend".

On eating animals:
"And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else".

On God:
"- The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr. Deasy said. All human history moves toward one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb toward the window, saying:
- That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
- What? Mr. Deasy asked.
- A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders."

"Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us…"

On History, or perhaps Irish history:
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake".

More on Ireland:
"It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant".

"I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, and English and an Italian.
Italian? Haines said.
A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me…
Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?
The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church."

" - We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them".

On life:
"Useless words. Things go on same, day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second".

"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past".

On meaninglessness:
"Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words?"

On memories:
"There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him … Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful"

Mothers:
"Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail".

"Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one coffin. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible even in the earth".

On oneness(?):
"Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward in flyboard with sllt the first branch of quirefold papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt".

On tolerance:
"It’s all very fine to boast of human superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so to speak".

On the transience of life:
"… of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison of which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity".

On War:
"…he was only too conscious of the casualties invariably resulting from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity and the misery and suffering it entailed as a forgone conclusion on fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word".

On the younger generation:
"To revert to Mr. Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not pity".

On Brewers: :-)
"For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat".

Favorite part, Chapter 13, Bloom ogling the girl (yes, at it again):
"You would have to travel many a long mile before you found a head of hair the like of that. She could almost see the swift answering flash of admiration in his eyes that set her tingling in every nerve. She put on her hat so that she could see from underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eying her as a snake eyes its prey. Her woman's instinct told her that she had raised the devil in him and at the thought a burning scarlet swept from throat to brow till the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose".
...
"His dark eyes fixed themselves on her again, drinking in her every contour, literally worshipping at her shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a man's passionate gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man's face. It is for you, Gertrude MacDowell, and you know it".
...
"How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither, with a tiny lost cry".
...
"She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her gracefully beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew too about the passion of men like that, hotblooded...."
...
"...she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn't ashamed and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn't resist...."
...
"Leopold Bloom (for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been! He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don't tell".
...
"Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet again, there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her dream of yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls met in a last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full of a strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She half smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged on tears, and then they parted".
...
"He flung his wooden pen away. The stick fell in stilted sand, stuck. Now if you were trying to do that for a week on end you couldn't. Chance. We'll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made me feel so young".

That's it. Jeez that's a lot of excerpts and a lot of words. Ah well, it's a lot of book too. :-) ( )