20th out of 161 books
—
195 voters
Ulysses
by
James Joyce
A classic depiction of exile, estrangement, paralysis, and the disintegration of a society, Ulysses records the events of one average day, June 16, 1904, in the lives of three central figures.
Paperback, Penguin Modern Classics, 933 pages
Published
March 30th 2000
by Penguin
(first published 1922)
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Update: I've been trolled twice now on this review, and I'm going to take down my stars because I think it's like a red-flag to a certain kind of intellectual asshole. I've always been bothered by the rating-system, and this is perfect example of how radically imprecise that metric is. I don't care what these jerks think of me or my opinion, but I'm sick of people triggering off over a rating. I do believe I will try to read this again some day. I can't say the stars will change, but maybe I can...more
16 Eumaeus.
Difficulty : 9
Obscenity: 0
General mindblowing brilliance : 3
Beauty of language : 0
Strange scores for this chapter but it is one of the strangest.
In the beginning novels were written in the first person (Robinson Crusoe, 1719) or a number of first persons, as in the epistolatory novels like Clarissa, 1748, or in the omniscient third person narrator manner which became the default in fiction. In Tom Jones (1749) Fieldin...more
I wanted to start out discussing the baggage that comes with reading this book and the challenge of attempting to reach a verdict on its quality in out-of-5-star form, let alone that of trying to write a coherent response. But unfortunately, I’ve already covered that intro ground with another review. But where I succeeded in not becoming a slobbering fanboy or prickish contrarian on that occasion, I have here, much to my own surprise, failed. During the early episodes of the book I felt like...more
Elizabeth
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
tam-lin,
2010,
books-about-books,
gods-myths-heroes,
irish,
reviewed,
i-was-wrong,
modern-love
I hate you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you. I love you. Damn you. Stop laughing. You are driving me totally crazy but you are also the only book I want to read. That’s it, the moment when every other book seems boring, uninteresting, not worth investing my time in, because there is Ulysses on the table, and no matter how annoyed I am at it, the author, modernism, dead Greeks, and myself for picking it up in the first place (again), it’s still all I want to read.
It’s a great book...more
It’s a great book...more
Well-written books should participate in a "conversation" with each other and with us when we read them. I made the mistake of inviting Joyce - via Ulysses - to join my literary conversation. He's not much of a conversationalist. He mostly just sat in a corner mumbling incoherenly to himself. Every once in a while he'd quote - or try to ridicule - something he'd read somewhere, but that's not really conversation is it? More like namedropping.
Buried within Joyce's verbosi...more
Buried within Joyce's verbosi...more
Completed Review: August 25, 2011
My Review is here:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2735...
Reading Notes
My Reading Notes are here:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2735...
Original Drunken Book Review: March 6, 2011
Warning: Some alcoholic substances were consumed by the author of this review. The rest, though regrettably significant in quantity, were consumed by the keyboard of his thirsty desktop c...more
My Review is here:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2735...
Reading Notes
My Reading Notes are here:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2735...
Original Drunken Book Review: March 6, 2011
Warning: Some alcoholic substances were consumed by the author of this review. The rest, though regrettably significant in quantity, were consumed by the keyboard of his thirsty desktop c...more
5 stars because its a work of genius, so everyone says.
4 stars because it has so many deep literary and classical references that to say one understood the book, is like saying one is very well educated.
3 stars because the words, strung together in a stream-of-consciousness mellifluous, onomatopoeic way, read just beautifully.
2 stars because it was boring as hell. I just couldn't care less about the characters, I just wanted them to get on with whatever they w...more
4 stars because it has so many deep literary and classical references that to say one understood the book, is like saying one is very well educated.
3 stars because the words, strung together in a stream-of-consciousness mellifluous, onomatopoeic way, read just beautifully.
2 stars because it was boring as hell. I just couldn't care less about the characters, I just wanted them to get on with whatever they w...more
as a bloke with an english degree, i guess i'm supposed to extol all thing joycian and gladly turn myself self over to the church of joye. after all, that's what english grads do, right? we revel in our snobbery and gloat about having read 'gravity's rainbow' and 'ulysses' start to finish.
well, i may be in the minority when i say i didn't care for this book at all. i get that it's a complex book with innumerable references to greek mythology, heavy allegories, dense poetry wacky str...more
well, i may be in the minority when i say i didn't care for this book at all. i get that it's a complex book with innumerable references to greek mythology, heavy allegories, dense poetry wacky str...more
Maybe my favorite book and definitely a strange obsession of mine. I knew next to nothing about Irish history before reading this but had a masochistic streak of reading insanely difficult books, so that was enough to get me going. If you read "The Bloomsday Guide" along with it, it's actually not so hard, but Joyce is definitely an acquired taste, and I would recommend NOT starting here with him. The logical order in which to read him would be chronological: Dubliners, Portrait, t...more
Kelly
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
People who have a lot of time on their hands and a masochistic streak
I don't feel really worthy to review this book. It's Ulysses. It's the greatest modern novel in the English language. It's a love letter to it and a history of it and has a sick, twisted relationship with it's readers and has actually driven people to a lifetime of studying just a few chapters of it. I know I missed a thousand things in every ten pages I read, and if I went back again, I'd see things completely differently.
And nonetheless, I did read it, and I feel the need to mark t...more
And nonetheless, I did read it, and I feel the need to mark t...more
I Can't do it, It fell in my toilet and didn't dry well, and I'm accepting it as an act of god. I decided against burning it, and just threw it out.
Yes, I am a horrible person.
Yes, I am a horrible person.
"...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 Ye...more
Michael Kneeland
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
anyone unafraid of 768 pages and hear-say
You can always tell a book will be timeless when it's got a story all of its own:
Joyce first tried shopping the colossal Ulysses manuscript around Paris in 1920, but was turned down by nearly everybody. Then 1922 came along and an adventurous young entrepreneur named Sylvia Beach--who owned a little bookshop called Shakespeare and Co., which attracted the likes of young Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and even our anti-Semitic poet-at-large, Ezra Pound--managed to have it publi...more
Joyce first tried shopping the colossal Ulysses manuscript around Paris in 1920, but was turned down by nearly everybody. Then 1922 came along and an adventurous young entrepreneur named Sylvia Beach--who owned a little bookshop called Shakespeare and Co., which attracted the likes of young Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and even our anti-Semitic poet-at-large, Ezra Pound--managed to have it publi...more
Things that surprised me about Ulysses:
1. It wasn't just a bunch of victorian prissy hyperbole, it really is pornographic.
2. It's about an ad man.
3. It was only hard to read for the first 100 pages.
4. It is NOT about a man just walking across Dublin. Why does everyone always tell me that? What a bad description!
1. It wasn't just a bunch of victorian prissy hyperbole, it really is pornographic.
2. It's about an ad man.
3. It was only hard to read for the first 100 pages.
4. It is NOT about a man just walking across Dublin. Why does everyone always tell me that? What a bad description!
Life is too short to read Ulysses.
Whenever I dip into Ulysses I always wonder why I'm not reading it all the time. Shakespeare is the only other writer who can make me feel that way. My first reading was probably the headiest literary experience of my life. The crotchety professor of a freshman year Russian Lit survey followed his comparison of the narrator of Babel's Red Cavalry to Leopold Bloom with a taunt that went something like: "but who of you know who Leopold Bloom is?" So challenged, I started out on a reading...more
I remember how once many years ago I decided to throw a punch at a much larger friend of mine. The response didn't hurt: his fist expanded to fill the frame of my vision and then there was a white flash and momentary disconnect from the senses. Unable to directly apprehend the damage and so gauge the cost of our conflict I decided the most prudent course of action was quick surrender. Meeting Ulysses on its own terms leaves the reader (or at least this one) at a similar disadvantage. To compenst...more
Brian
added it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Someone more ambitious than me.
Shelves:
tried-to-read-but-failed
Ten pages a day. Wish me luck. . . .
UPDATE!!! I'm now forty-five pages in and find myself asking if this is something I really, really want to do. Because let me tell you, I aint digging it. Maybe I'm not intelligent, but reading this book seems like traveling cross-country - at night - solely through the tops of trees. It's damn hard and ridiculous work, with nothing to gain from it other than the satisfaction of having done it.
I'm going to try and hang in there, but hon...more
UPDATE!!! I'm now forty-five pages in and find myself asking if this is something I really, really want to do. Because let me tell you, I aint digging it. Maybe I'm not intelligent, but reading this book seems like traveling cross-country - at night - solely through the tops of trees. It's damn hard and ridiculous work, with nothing to gain from it other than the satisfaction of having done it.
I'm going to try and hang in there, but hon...more
So: is this book one of the best novels of the twentieth century or a load of rubbish? Well, it's difficult to tell: certainly when I first tried it reading it I was definitely moving to the latter viewpoint. However, after looking at some very positive reviews on this website and seeing that it is a favourite book of respectable writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Anthony Burgess, I decided to try again and once you get into it, it becomes quite enjoyable (in a strange way).
In t...more
In t...more
This Will Make Sense - Eventually!
When I started this book, I must admit it was slow going. I was never a big fan of Joyce. Dubliners was cold and a bit too precious for me. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was likewise nothing to get too excited over. So it was solely with a sense of responsibility to literary tradition that I finally opened my age-old copy of Ulysses to see what all the fuss was about.
Immediately I hated it as I've hated few books before. Dense and...more
When I started this book, I must admit it was slow going. I was never a big fan of Joyce. Dubliners was cold and a bit too precious for me. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was likewise nothing to get too excited over. So it was solely with a sense of responsibility to literary tradition that I finally opened my age-old copy of Ulysses to see what all the fuss was about.
Immediately I hated it as I've hated few books before. Dense and...more
The Vintage Classics is a great version to get because it includes the Supreme Court ruling from Judge Woolsey lifting the ban on "Ulysses" which allowed it back into the United States. Besides, it also contains the Joyce's corrected text.
It's true that this book revolutionized and refined stream-of-conciousness but it's almost too easy to get caught up in that fact. Really, though, Joyce is doing nothing more in his writing than what people do every day in their lives. Wh...more
It's true that this book revolutionized and refined stream-of-conciousness but it's almost too easy to get caught up in that fact. Really, though, Joyce is doing nothing more in his writing than what people do every day in their lives. Wh...more
This is the eighth book I read on my commute, and the first one that took longer than a week to read. This is a big, heavy, dense book, in terms of mental effort and also physically (I read a prestige-format hardcover edition, the kind with gilt pages and a built-in cloth bookmark like a Bible).
A while ago my dad and I were talking about the fact that we were both English majors but we both had major gaps in our personal reading histories with respect to the canon of classics. We d...more
A while ago my dad and I were talking about the fact that we were both English majors but we both had major gaps in our personal reading histories with respect to the canon of classics. We d...more
I don't know why but this part of Ulysses has always amused me terribly:
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all...more
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all...more
The situation of the global community today has left a lot to be wary in times of emergency. Not long ago we have heard of the disaster affecting New Zealand. Then came the Middle East crisis. And just a week back, that unfortunate tragedy in Japan that affected millions of lives, costing to unaccountable billions of dollars.
While the threat of a nuclear meltdown has been elevated in Japan (and is even seen as inevitable by some), the crisis in the Middle Eastern countries is also h...more
While the threat of a nuclear meltdown has been elevated in Japan (and is even seen as inevitable by some), the crisis in the Middle Eastern countries is also h...more
This isn’t so much a review as a piece detailing my personal experience with reading Ulysses. It’s pretty long, but if you make it to the end I’ll take you out for an ice cream.
There are a few excerpts which could maybe constitute spoilers. It also features the c word in a quotation, just fyi.
---
The internet has a very large impact on what kinds of things I choose to read, watch, and listen to. If I see a book I’ve never heard of, I will generally look it up ...more
There are a few excerpts which could maybe constitute spoilers. It also features the c word in a quotation, just fyi.
---
The internet has a very large impact on what kinds of things I choose to read, watch, and listen to. If I see a book I’ve never heard of, I will generally look it up ...more
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
"...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 go...more
"...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 go...more
Emily
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
people who don't mind consulting a dictionary every few sentences
Shelves:
to-read-again,
booksofthepast
I think few people would argue with the assertion that James Joyce was a little nutso. Most geniuses are, right? This "insane but brilliant" quality is never so clear as in "Ulysses." A story of three Dubliners based loosely on characters from Homer's "The Odyssey," this novel is a wonderland of archaic references, ancient languages, witty puns, and double entendres. Reading it is less about experiencing the telling of a story and more about being bombarded by h...more
Lucky for me, the first encounter I ever had with Ulysses was with an actual 1930's edition of the book (ancient artifact!) stuffed in the shelf of the library of a university where a writing workshop I attended took place. And it was one of the strangest experiences to crack it open expecting something like most other books, only to find a huge S and a lot of dashes where there should have been quotes. (Perhaps I'm getting my facts mixed up because I can't remember if that edition had the big S...more
Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written. If Finnegan's Wake is Joyce's magnum opus, this book is no less significant and vastly more accessible. Not that it's an easy read, by any means. It will challenge you at every turn, and it's mysteries and arcana are seeminly endless and endlessly diverting for those who take great pleasure in pursuing words. A purposeful schematic architecture -- the wanderings of Ulysses - overlays the story of the very mundane and recongnizable psychological trou...more
Okay so it started out and I thought cool, this guy has some very unique imagery, a poem disguised as prose. And the stream of conciousness was pretty easy to follow, quite fun actually. But then there were pages upon pages with attempts at different forms like newspaper headlines and play scripts. And as things wound on I felt like I was listening to the Doors--I mean Riders on the Storm is cool the first minute or two, but 7 minutes later you are screaming for it to end. The brothel scene ...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brain Pain: Discussion - Week Two - Ulysses - Episode 4, 5, & 6 | 18 | 17 | 39 minutes ago | |
| Brain Pain: Discussion - Week One - Ulysses - Episode 1, 2, & 3 | 82 | 36 | Feb 08, 2012 01:58pm | |
| Recommend a resource? | 11 | 23 | Feb 07, 2012 06:09pm | |
| The Bloomsbury Gr...: Recent Articles About or "near" The Bloomsbury Group | 5 | 6 | Feb 07, 2012 05:40am | |
| Brain Pain: * Questions, Resources and General Banter - Ulysses | 63 | 70 | Feb 05, 2012 07:09am | |
| You'll love this ...: Ulysses | 5 | 16 | Jan 31, 2012 08:51pm | |
| Let's Get Through...: Currently reading up to section "Hades" | 1 | 6 | Dec 26, 2011 11:56am |
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex ...more
More about James Joyce...
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex ...more
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“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
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“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
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(psst, there are links scattered throughout this thread, I'm sure one of them will lead you back to VirJohn's loving a...more
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