"Ulysses" by James Joyce

I did it. I'm done with Ulysses. It's been a long, long journey. Hundreds of miles, uphill in the snow in the dead of night. And now that I'm at the end, I'm wondering . . . did I really go anywhere at all?

My journey with Ulysses was a winding one. I don't remember when I started reading it, but it was literally years ago. Nearly ten, I would guess. When I first started, about once a week I would pick it up and read a few pages. (Well, it was on my Kindle, so there was that annoying thing where I really didn't know how many pages I'd read since it measures percent read rather than showing page numbers.) After two months I'd read about 20% of it, which was maybe 100 pages.

One hundred pages and most of it made no sense to me. Every now and then a beautiful moment of clarity would break through, but that didn't happen anywhere near often enough. Half of me was thinking maybe I needed some kind of guidebook, and the other half of me was thinking . . . if I can't read a book on its own then what good is it?

And then my Kindle broke. I have a feeling one of my many children stepped on it. My fault, of course, for leaving it in a step-on-able place. This was my second broken Kindle, and (unlike the first time) my luck (and my warranty) had run out, and I decided not to replace it. Despite the free-ness of all books in the public domain, I think I'll just never love electronic reading the way I love real paper books--maybe that's another blog post for another time. For now, back to Ulysses.

Newly Kindle-less, I did not want to give up on Ulysses, so I decided to continue reading it using the Kindle app on my phone. But, curses! The app did not know where I had stopped reading, and neither did I. (I actually tried to find my place! But failed miserably. It all seemed like unfamiliar territory!) So I did the only thing there was to do, and started over again at the beginning.

I tried to be smarter about it this time. I tried to actually follow what I was reading, and I even took some notes which I will reproduce for you here:

1. Some guys who live in a tower by the Irish seaside eat breakfast.
2. They swim.
3. One of them (Stephen Dedalus) teaches schoolboys. He helps one of the more stupid ones with his sums, then talks with an older professor who hates Jews and who wants to make known a cure for hoof and mouth disease. 
4. A bunch of gobbledygook nonsense, then Dedalus visits his uncle, then more nonsense.
5. Did someone just pull a dead body from the sea? The possibility has been mentioned a few times before, but maybe now it's actually happening. I'm not sure, though.
6. Some lady is in bed. Someone is going to Patrick Dignam's funeral but first cooks a kidney and then takes a crap. He is Flower or Bloom. Leopold Bloom? He snitched a letter from the lady because she was hiding it from him.
7. Nope, he was hiding it from her. It was from his lover. He buys her a bar of soap and puts it in his pocket.
8. Several men take a carriage to the funeral. It's possible that Dignam was the body from #5.
9. "Far away a donkey brayed." Ha! Usually it's a dog barking in the distance.
10. Someone (Dedalus Bloom? Is that even a character's name or am I mixing two of them up?) takes out an ad in the paper.
11. A whole conversation at or about the newspaper just went right over my head.
12. Did I just read a bunch of pages in which a handful of men sat around in a pub and had a conversation that made no sense to me? I'm not quite sure.
13. Father Conmee leaves the pub (maybe?) and asks some boys to post a letter for him.
14. Now it's skipping around to all these people I've never heard of before. 
15. Some sort of Alice in Wonderland trial.
16. A woman speaks for pages and pages without once pausing. This must be a record for the longest sentence ever written. (Yep, it is. I checked.)
17. The end. 

I really have no idea whether I am pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing, or if I am just a plebeian swine, but I did not find this book worth reading. Though I'm not sure I can actually truly say I read it. Did I look at every single word in sequential order? Yes. Did it make sense to me? No. Am I glad I did it? Yes, but only because it was a challenge and I have accomplished what I set out to do.

I am sure there are people in the world who love this book (though that number of people is probably quite a bit smaller than the number of people who merely *say* they love this book). I am sure there are people in the world who are smarter than I am, who were able to read this book and make sense of it. I am sure there are people in the world who have devoted their whole lives to reading Joyce's works, as the author himself apparently once demanded. I am not one of those people. I'm just the person who thinks . . . it took seven years to write this book???

This may be the only book that takes longer to read than it took to write. And I'm not sure whether that says more about the writer or the reader.