Ulysses

⚖The case for it

June 16, 1904. One ordinary Dublin day, imagined so thoroughly that strangers now celebrate it annually like a holiday. "This novel is outright hilarious," one reader insists, and the funny is load-bearing: a running bawdy undertone beneath all the difficulty. The stunts pay their way, Oxen of the Sun walking the whole history of English prose inside one chapter, Ithaca's dry catechism producing the most beautiful starry-night writing Joyce ever did, and Molly's unpunctuated close ranked by many as the finest thing in the book. "A divine work of art and will live on," runs one verdict. The honest ones add the caveat up front: it "definitely requires some homework to fully appreciate." The annotations are not a tax. They are the tour.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"Life is too short to read Ulysses." For a shelf built on counting your remaining books, that reader states a real cost argument. The texture: "every scrap of word association and mental flotsam," Dublin in-jokes only a local of 1904 would catch, untranslated Latin, and stretches one reader files as "an unrelenting nightmare." Bailouts cluster between pages forty and eighty. Even some of the praise smells of duress: "5 stars because it's a work of genius, so everyone says." The coldest verdict is a century old, from a fellow novelist left "puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." Woolf did this technique with the connective tissue left in.

— the honest librarian

15h

honest hours

21

sittings