When was the last time you read a book that you could barely understand half of what the author says yet you're completely overawed and riveted by his story and his gift? This happened when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's second most famous novel and the Modern Library’s third greatest English language novel of the 20th century. No doubt, A Portrait is a difficult read but nonetheless a thoroughly satisfactory one—at least intellectually. My normal reading speed is 35-40 pages an hour for a serious work of literature, and 60-70 pages for a lighter read but Joyce's A Portrait slowed me down to 20-25 pages an hour--and that happened only when I was completely focused. Brilliantly and beautifully written, Joyce's A Portrait is the author's self-mocking but stubborn self-portrait -- his coming of age, his thirst for experience, his quest for freedom, and his forging in "the smithy of his soul" "an uncreated conscience of his race." Thus, in a larger sense, A Portrait is a portrait of Dublin, Joyce's city or more precisely of Ireland and its struggle for independence from Britain and the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, Joyce’s A Portrait is a serious novel dealing with serious Irish issues--language, religion, art, authority, and nationality. Joyce has a complex, beautiful prose yet I'm under a constant impression that the writing just flows to him naturally like a stream of water without any conscious effort. The book is laced with a number of inventive techniques such as the use of quotations and historic allusions, the shift from a third-person narrative to dialogues to journal entries to trace the protagonist's intellectual growth, and these innovative techniques marked Joyce as one of the first modernist writers of the 20th century.