"I remember touring NYU when I was between junior and senior year of high school. Right there, in the middle of the Art Department main office, was a black and white photograph of a woman sitting on the toilet. I was shocked. She had a faraway look in her eyes, and she was clearly thinking about something else-- the grocery list, all the things she had to do, something overwhelming. I was... confused but mentally intrigued. I had never seen anyone on the toilet before, and it's not something I actively think about other people doing. Ulysses is a lot like that. Almost as soon as Leopold Bloom, the main character, is introduced, we see him on the toilet."
"Horrible. How was this ever published? It's the ramblings of a drunk."
"how many high school English teachers would flunk Joyce for writing as he did in said book"
"Does Ulysses deserve its reputation? I'd have to say no. It's a good book, but it just feels too dry and stale in the context of now. Though it may have paved the way for contemporary literature, I couldn't honestly say that it's the number one book of the century."
"Was this book written in a foreign language? I speak English but it made no sense to me. I started to read it because it is honored as such a great book. But I found no honor in it."
"It's indecipherable. I tried looking at the first few pages before and gave up."
"Does anyone else have trouble reading this or is it just me? Books like these just make me sleepy. It's almost like the ramblings of a schizophrenic."
"though I haven't read it, people enjoyed literature in a different way than we do now in ye olde times."
"The preferences of an intellegent few are of no interest to me, unless that intellegence correlates with something else like the preference for beauty or wisdom. Remember, crosswords and Sudoku are complicated, dense and require time. Whole systems of medieval thought are dense and require time. And indeed the people who loved these useless frameworks were probably intelligent."
"Technical prowess is not a sufficient condition for a great or even good novel."
"Joyce. The premier literature of do-nothing intellectuals."
"Mr. Joyce's works were uniformly terrible ... Shakespeare is also direly overrated, as well as a slew of other literature that is required reading at the HS and University levels. All signs of relevance are lost."
"I ripped through this thing in like an hour and a half, while watching 'Crossword All-Stars' on t.v., and cleaning the fish tank. It's a good book for multitasking, because the plot is so thin and watery.. nothing really happens! Just some shaving, walking around town.. crap like that. Now I have bragging rights to say I've read it, which is apparently a big deal to some people (losers), but honestly, I wouldn't recommend you waste your time. I actually heard that Joyce wrote this book as a basic reading lesson for immigrants who were learning English as a second language. He'd probably laugh himself silly, if he read the reviews on here that try to ascribe deep and oh-so-meaningful symbolism into it!"
"Sad for Ireland that their greatest work of fiction is unreadable. I know. I've tried many times.
...
The historic censorship issues aside,the book is pretty tame by today's standards and wouldn't pass a discerning editor's muster."
"Ah, this is a great con.
The book is, of course, utter drivel.
My theory is that this just Joyce's way of winding people up.
His thinking was (I paraphrase) 'Let me write a complete load of tripe then watch all the reviewers and critics get intellectual about it whilst pretending to understand it'.
Beyond that, good as a wedge for steadying a rickety table but otherwise a waste of ink and paper."
"I think the intellectuals praise the book so much because they are supposed to. Just like culinary experts praise oysters because that's what they're supposed to do."
"I CANNOT STRESS HOW MUCH I HATE JAMES JOYCE FOR EXISTING."
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