Polly Parrot

Must find some reading for during the flight and while waiting for it.

February is my renewed fight with my washer which has recently become quite temperamental. Bad timing for it as I'm flying out on Monday and really like having clean clothes and not coming back to a pile of washing.

Hi! I've been looking for a new book forum to join and this seems like a nice and active place. That and I saw a thread on Ulysses when first browsing the forum. About me: I'm currently researching James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as part of a Ph.D. Aside from my Joyce-related reading I don't really have one specific genre I stick to and tend to read a little bit of everything. I enjoy the odd crime novel but when I have the time for it I also like reading the classics and am currently debating whether or not to give Proust another go.

Not in particular to be honest. I enjoyed reading Virginia Woolf's works, Mrs Dalloway in particular. I've recently read two novels by Guy Ware which were both excellent (Reconciliation and The Fat of Fed Beasts). I like to think I read a little bit of everything. Conversation starter and ender depending on the audience, I get a lot of blank stares. I suppose that comes with this level of nerdiness. I still enjoy reading, yes, though sometimes I can get a little carried away when a passage in a book which I'm not reading for my research reminds me of it. With the Joyce books themselves: at the moment I read them for research more than anything, so when reading them I tend to go into the allusions a little too much I think. Maybe some time will help remedy that. I've just got A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on audiiobook though and have managed to just listen to it without overthinking things.

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is one of my favourites, it can be a bit of a challenge though.

Aloud and in an Irish accent seems to be the way if going down that route. Personally, the first time I read Ulysses I didn't use a guide as I wanted to form my own opinion first of all without being guided by someone else's interpretation. I did use guide books on subsequent readings. As to which guide you'd be looking to use wholly depends on how much time you want to spend analysing allusions made throughout.Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses is useful and as an added bonus is written by a personal friend of Joyce, under his guidance. A more general guide is Harry Blamire's The New Bloomsday Book which gives neat summaries of each chapter. If you're looking to go on a Joycean treasure hunt, try Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford & Robert J Seidman or Weldon Thornton's Allusions in Ulysses: An Annoted List: An Annotated List.