February 10, 2007
Recently, I got to thinking about James Joyce for the first time in ages. I heard some interesting facts about him on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and it made me consider sampling Ulysses again. Ulysses is a book I’ve started many times in my life but never finished. This time around, I found a complete manuscript online, threw it on my hard drive, and started reading…and I was amazed to discover that it finally made sense to me. Every other time I started Ulysses, I had trouble getting past the (to me) unorthodox punctuation, style, and formatting…but this time, I not only followed it, but could appreciate how gifted Joyce was in terms of description, dialogue, and nuance. Still, it’s a loooong book. Let’s see if I can get to the end, or I get kicked out like all the times before.
