** spoiler alert ** I chose this book to celebrate Banned Book Week this year because I had read one short story from it back in college that made an impression on me.

It took me much longer than the allotted week to finish this short book, (1) because I am a slow reader by nature, and (2) because I annotated my copy. After the fifth story ("After The Race") I began to mark passages, scribbled notes down the margins, and finally summarized my impressions on the last pages, really so I'd have something to write in this entry. But now I know how much more I've added of myself to this volume that it goes beyond meeting a deadline and a blog post.

I will not detail every story, but rather the ones that I enjoyed most.

"Little Cloud" -- Little Chandler meets up with an old friend, Gallaher, who dazzles him with wild, exotic stories of his fabulous, single life. Little Chandler is mocked by his old friend for his physical smallness and his 'small' life. When he compares himself to Gallaher, Chandler admits how his pales in comparison and he begins to question what before made him happy. But his doubts were preexisting, probably developed years before with the very same friend. He is defeated, despaired, and trapped.

"Counterparts" -- Farrington is beat down at work, beat down by poverty, by his wife, his friends (who sponge off him and physically beat him in arm wrestling). He takes it out on someone he can best. Theme of desperation and being trapped -- dreaming of a 'better life' -- more money, more drinking, an English woman -- with no prospects of change, except for worse circumstances.

"Clay" -- The assumptions that Maria would never marry -- were they based on her own example/choice, on what others perceived either by her lack of a man or looks, or because she was a certain age? Marie's still considered a child in many ways: diminutive figure, condescending conversations, ignored by men her real age and acknowledged by grandfather figures; irresponsible (when she lost the plum cake), Joe reminiscing on the past, ignoring her attempts to reconcile the past.

What really interested me most was the game they played: "...girls put some saucers on the table and then led the children up to the table, blindfold. One got the prayer-book and the other three got the water; and when one of the next-door girls got the ring Mrs. Donnelly shook her finger at the blushing girl as much as to say: O, I know all about it!" When Maria was forced to play, "she felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage. There was a pause for a few seconds; and then a great deal of scuffling and whispering...Mrs. Donnelly said something very cross to one of the next-door girls and told her to throw it out at once: that was no play."

What was in the bowl that made them insist Maria take a second turn to get the prayer book next go round?

"A Painful Case" -- James Duffy led a perfectly organized & itemized life, shunning nearly everyone from his peers to the poor. Everything was turned on its head when he met Emily Sinico. Whether he realized it at the time or not, theirs was a love affair, both filling emptiness within: she with love, he with a companion/equal. When Emily crossed the line by touching his hand to her cheek, she became vulgar in his mind, falling out of the compartment of understanding he'd' placed her in. Just as before, Duffy shunned her & went about his life. Emily died, hit by a train. She killed herself, but really died four years before her death when he left her. She'd tried to drink him away, to fill the void he'd left.

Duffy's first reaction to the news is shameful yet typical for his type. Only once he's alone does the thought of her loneliness, her sadness & ultimately his own occur to him. He finally realizes that she was the only person who could have cared about him and now that she's gone, he will remain alone even beyond death, having failed to impress himself upon anyone else. So much could have been different had he rejected propriety and his own self-righteous manners (she was a married woman)! Duffy may have even been loved and remembered.

The last story of The Dubliners is the reason I chose this book, but ultimately it was because of my British Literature Professor, Dr. John Gregory. He included "The Dead" in my sophomore level English class that semester and it has stayed fresh in my mind, even ten years later. I know I read the story, I don't think I got much out of it when I did, but I can still hear Dr. Gregory when he lectured about it. Two lines. Two lines he read aloud out of countless paragraphs and I can still recall even the tone he used -- barely more than a whispered reply to sarcasm:

"And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?"
"I think he died for me," she answered.

Gabriel Conroy is a modern Irish man who seems to have shunned his heritage and given up things of the 'outmoded' past for forward thinking. He and his wife, Gretta, attend a party hosted by his Aunts and throughout the evening he is challenged from multiple persons: from the Aunts, laughing at his modern goloshes; Miss Ivors, who calls him a West Briton who refuses to rejoice in his own country/land; from his wife, Gretta, who he feels is almost condescending and yet ignorant of his desires. When finally the evening is over and despite many knocks to his choices, Gabriel returns to the hotel with Gretta in an amorous mood, but it is soon broken when he discovers his wife is very melancholy over a song from the party.

When questioned, Gretta tells her husband about a young boy who used to love her when she was younger, who sang that song for her. Gabriel is full of contempt for this young man, Michael Furey, for taking his wife's love, he thinks. She dispels his misconceptions when she explains that the boy died. He said he'd rather not live than go away from her window, and shortly thereafter he died. All these years later she still clung to his passion, his eyes when he spoke to her.

Eventually Gabriel and Gretta settle down to bed, and he thinks over the entire evening, and by extension, his life. As the snow falls outside his hotel window, Gabriel accepts that the snow fell evening upon everyone and everything -- from Ireland to England to Europe, to his old 'land' to his Dublin, from his Aunts to Miss Ivors, from Michael Furey's grave to himself, "upon all the living and the dead."

Gabriel, so full of forward thinking and disdain for his past or any connection whatsoever to anything not modern or proper, finally realizes and accepts that there are much greater things in which to take pride. Like true passion. The passion of Miss Ivors for her heritage, her country. The passion of his Aunts for music and past great performers. The passion of Michael Furey, who had nothing and no one to live for but Gretta, whom he would never have. The passion of Gretta, for her history with love from which she was able to learn how to love Gabriel, despite his often-haughty nature.

Dr. Gregory showed empathy for the characters -- for Gretta and Michael, and even some left over for Gabriel -- with those two lines, which have left such a mark upon me.

Not everyone will like James Joyce, but I did, and I found these fifteen short stories written over one hundred years ago in a country far removed from my own, to be as poignant and meaningful today as I'm sure they were then.