Ben Mines
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Posts posted by Ben Mines
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Of course it's preachy. What did you expect? Bunyan was a preacher, and the book is a Christian allegory.
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Just out of curiosity, BookJumper, how far through it did you get before you "gave up in dismay" ?
I would argue that most of what you need to know to understand the main theme of the book—which is how Stephen, Bloom and Molly spend June 16, 1904—is contained within the book itself: by the time you finish it, every loose end has been fussily tied up.
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It seems as though the fate of Ulysses is to be a book that is given the highest possible praise by academics and writers but which no one reads.
It is widely considered to be not only the greatest achievement of literary modernism, but the greatest book ever written. It tops the NY Times and Modern Library 100 Best list, and has garnered the highest praise from countless literary lights, from Jorge Luis Borges to Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov's praise (he called it "The greatest book ever written") is especially noteworthy, seeing as he heaped curmudgeonly scorn on almost every other darling of the literati (see Strong Opinions), while Borges, (who should know: he probably read more than has any man who ever lived), opined that Joyce wrote lines, "worthy of Shakespeare." And yet, despite all this, I have not met a single person, in the flesh, who has actually read it.
To begin with, I am simply interested to know if anyone else has actually read it.
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Iago from Othello - he's a fantastic villain!
Precisely.
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John Waters also had a wonderful quote about books, but it includes a naughty word, so I won't repeat it here!
Let's hear it. Just asterisk the word out.
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One, but at the moment I am reading 5.
Ulysses with: The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses; Ulysses Annotated; James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study; and Ulysses: Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Jeri Johnson.
I quickly learnt that if you are going to make this odyssey, it is best to be armed to the teeth.
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Thanks Chimera.
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I wanted to share these four thoughtful excerpts on books.
The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries -
True. Good books talk to and about each other. The Waste Land led me to Kyd and Webster; The Library of Babel to The Anatomy of Melancholy; Ulysses to Homer; The Junky to the Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
You could follow the forking paths of this anastomotic world of literature forever.
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The one you posted up is the edition I have, however, the picture on the cover, although the same is half the size. Glad I got this one then.
Sorry, when I said how did you find it, I meant how did you come across it, by recommendation? I stumbled upon it searching through the ancient section where I was. It definitely stood out.
Oh. I think I first heard of it reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.
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Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
—Ulysses.
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A superb book.
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Ben- replied to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili thread, couldn't find a way to PM you?
Just one thing, Bookologist. When you order this book, be sure to order the hardback edition! The cover of the paperback edition is a gaudy commercial farce, with a loud plug for The Rule of Four, which horribly mars the value of the book as an aesthetic object, which is something it was emphatically intended to be.
See for yourself. (I couldn't find a bigger image of the softcover edition, but you can probably see from this thumbnail that it's hardly what the creator of this supremely elegant book had in mind).
The softcover cover:
The hardcover cover:
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How did you find it Ben Mines?[/font][/size][/font][/size]
I found it pretty much as I described in my review: Tedious, eccentric, strange, beautiful, and very rewarding.
You will probably wear out several dictionaries looking up obscure architectural terms, but be sure to forge through to the end. It's definitely worth the effort.
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english
Bah-dah-boom, peesh!
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Most official best lists make me cringe and really are not to be taken too seriously.Fyodor Dostoyevski- The Brothers Karamazov (imo any official list without this on it is embarassing) one of the best books ever, possibly thee best.Victor Hugo- The laughing man.Franz Kafka- The trial.Alain Fournier- Le Grand Meaulnes.Moliere- Tartuffe.Impossible really to conduct a top 5, you could go on and on.Ben Mines- Good list! just bought Hypnerotomachia Poliphili & Don Quixote. Monuments of literature.
Thanks Bookologist.
I posted a review of the English translation of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili here. It didn't attract much attention, but then again (at least, so I tell myself) it's not a book that many people read.
(Warning: plot spoilers a gogo).
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Titus Andronicus is a bloodbath.
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FROM POSTHUMOUS POEMS, 1824
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
THE WANING MOON.
And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass—
TO THE MOON.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
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UPON JULIA’S CLOTHES
ROBERT HERRICK
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration, each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!
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What—what, I ask!—are you going to do if a work is discovered and published but dates to a year preceding your position on the reading timeline?
The answer should be obvious: a true CDO will go right back to the epic of Gilgamesh and start all over again.
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I see. .....
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I resubmit:
1. Ulysses, James Joyce
2. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
3. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
4. The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
5. Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
6. War and Peace, Tolstoy
7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
8. Time's Arrow, Martin Amis
9. Don Quixote, Cervantes
10. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
11. The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
12. The Ticket that Exploded, William Burroughs
13. The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz
14. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais
15. Hamlet, Shakespeare
16. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Colonna
17. Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway
18. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
19. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, De Quincey
20. Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
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Does anyone have the link to the BBC article in which this list appeared?
I fail to see what criteria were used. How could anyone put The Da Vinci Code and Ulysses on the same list?! War and Peace and Bridget Jones' Diary?! Also, number 14 is the Complete Works of Shakespeare and 98 Hamlet.
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1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Read 10 plays and the sonnets)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (First in TBR line)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Second in TBR line)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen-
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy-
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens-
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez-
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov-
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac-
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker-
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante-
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt -
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I didn't do too well, but then, many of the books on this list are mediocre at best.
Ulysses by James Joyce
in The Classics
Posted
I think it should be said, first off, that we cannot have a meaningful discussion about a book you haven't read. But I would like to respond to a few of the points you make:
I'm not sure I understand. Isn't this is like saying the simpler your structure, the more complex you can make it? Can you please explain how this is not a contradiction?
If you are saying that the underlying structure of a book should be simple, but with lots of "limbs" then you have described Ulysses. What could be simpler than the day in the life of three ordinary Dubliners? But if you are simply saying that you favour simplicity of form for a literature of ideas, then I agree, so long as it is a literature of simple ideas. Thereby, you are also writing off almost every important modernist text as well as almost every development in the visual arts since the start of the 20th century.
Thomas McGreevy summed up Ulysses' place in literature beautifully when he said:
Ulysses deals with the "inferno of modern subjectivity", which is anything but simple.
Again, you really do need to read a book to judge it. Ulysses is one of the most carefully structured books I have ever read. In fact, the exactness with which Joyce orchestrates every detail of his plot is staggering. In one of his essays, Borges speaks of a "teleology of words and episodes" that is the hallmark of good literature, concluding that,
Borges said, "lines worthy of Shakespare"; he was not saying that Ulysses was comparable to one of Shakespeare's plays. Furthermore, believe it or not, people also understand and enjoy Ulysses.