Ulysses
Joyce remade the English language in 1922 and dared anyone to follow. Stream of consciousness, interior monologue, mythic scaffolding under the mundane: the techniques that define literary modernism all converge here. Modern Library ranked it first. Most readers never finish it. Both facts are part of the point.
"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 case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
