The Book isn't Very Hard

[[deleted user]]

Chapter 17 is impossible, and parts of 13 and 14 ditto, but, other than that, this book is pretty easy read. Anybody else with me on this?

[Ashley]

It may be easy to read...but there is sooo much under the surface that probably gets missed by most readers without any background info or context.

Which is why reading and analysis are two different things.

[Marc]

when i started reading i was hung up on the idea of understanding everything so i went very slowly and it was extremely difficult. i was reading the penguin annotated student edition and i found that i increasingly lost faith with the notes. when i gave them up i sort of went with the flow of the book and i read at a much more natural pace. this experience of reading it made me think it is less difficult than it is made out to be but i never found it easy though. the content is very dense. i think that people who thought it was easy probably did not understand a very great deal of what was happening in it.

[[deleted user]]

Dan wrote: "Like a fine wine it's a novel that needs time to savour."

The novel's more like binge drinking, the next morning you try and figure out what happened last night.

[Richard Ehlke]

The novel can be enjoyed at several levels. I found the various rhythms of the prose and the lyricism of some of the chapters a pleasure in themselves over and above whether all the allusions were understandable.

[Marc]

it wasnt just the allusions that were difficult though was it, it was the text itself, the description of general action is not direct and can be almost impossible to apprehend. sometimes i just did not know what was going on at all, i really had to struggle to understand which characters were interacting and how, and sometimes i barely knew what they were saying to each other. and the philosophical issues that are introduced through the action, the actual meaning independent of content that could be seen as more historical or intertextual, it was just very complex. you can listen to it for its music like as though it is a song on the radio, but is that really reading?

[[deleted user]]

The book is easy to understand as long as you laugh.

[Jennifer]

After reading Ulysses and then Sound & the Fury, I thought that I would never like stream-of-consciousness writing. Then I read Woolf's To the Lighthouse and really enjoyed it. Left me wondering...can the thought processes of men and women be so different that a deep look inside one or the other may be difficult to connect for the opposite sex?

[Donna]

I thought the same as the deleted user who said it's easy to understand as long as you laugh...at first. But his misanthropic point of view and contempt for the reader outpace his word play and sense of humor, ultimately. I quit reading when I realized I wasn't having any more fun.

[Brian]

I'm no dummy, but I found this book very difficult to read, and it was only sheer determination that saw me read it all the way through. As to whether, in my opinion, it deseves to be called a true classic, the jury is still out.....

[Marc]

dont get the misanthropic part, i found it very optimistic. it is so classical in its celebration of the golden mean, the common fellow. ah, the last chapter, sooo perfect and beautiful! i love it!

not sure how to make sense of the contempt for reader part. i have heard people say that Joyce should have made his content more comprehensible to the general reader. is this the measurement of his contempt in this case? i think this is an indication not of the ego of Joyce, but of the ego of the reader, who expects that an artwork should be tailored to suit their own needs. isnt it a bit naive to imagine that form has no meaning or message?

as for not having fun: regardless of variations between personal experiences of enjoyment, why should the purpose of art necessarily include entertainment? if you dont find Ulysses entertaining, thats unfortunate, but even if no one else at all finds it entertaining, that does not mean it has no other content, meaning, or value of any other kind. there are plenty of books composed with a premium value on entertainment. Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Girl With Dragon Tattoo, pick a phenomenon, you have no shortage of things to entertain, so stop complaining!

and anyway what is up with people forming judgments on the value of books they have not actually succeeded in consuming?

[Marc]

Kevin wrote: "Strictly speaking, there's a difference between stream-of-consciousness (To The Lighthouse) and interior monologue (the first half of Ulysses)."

i found that remark very interesting! thank you!

[Linda]

I was wondering....the title....and re read the original adventures of the Greek Ulysses (Odysseus-the Trojan Horse and more!). It was actually more fun!

[Tiredstars]

I think it's moderately difficult to read. Joyce clearly loved language and wanted to use as much as possible, so the vocabulary used is very wide. What makes it particularly challenging is that the style makes it hard to figure out from the context what unfamiliar words mean.

Of course some chapters are trickier than others - the section where it lapses into middle english being the best example. If I hadn't read some of The Canterbury Tales last year and picked up the meanings of words like "eke" and "yclept" I would have been lost.

The length alone makes the book a more difficult read. It's easy to give up at the more boring parts, to put it down for a bit and lose track of things...

Going past just reading into how easy the book is to understand or appreciate, that's another question. I would suggest it's tricky, though it depends on your tastes.

[Kyle]

It's not as hard to read as many people make out. In fact, the thing that struck me most when I finally got around to reading Ulysses was just how easy most of was to read. That's not to say it's an "easy" read. There's a lot going on. And there were many portions of the book where I wished I had a better understanding of early 20th century Irish politics, or Irish culture and tradition, or Catholicism. But no one should be intimidated to read Ulysses, as I was for many years, under the misapprehension that the book is too difficult to read.

[John]

I assumed my copy was in English. I don't think so.

[Mathew (sic)]

I read it in ten days when I was 20 and again a month later. I had (and still have) hardly read anything. But I'm burnt out now and it's hard for me to read anything. All depends on how much you want to understand.