Ulysses Paperback – 1 Sept. 2012

If you want an easy read with a logical narrative it is not for you.If you love the music of language this is your book. Definitely one to listen to as it is sheer music. Listen with an open mind and no expectations. If you are a bit prudish avoid it. For me it is brimming with a love of life and all its mess.

Hard read and not for me. Too much like hard work. I kept going but for me not an enjoyable read

Reading Ulysses is an experience, an odyssey if you like.It is the heroic tale stripped bare from any misguiding suggestion of glory. In Ulysses life is not glorious, it's trivial. Should there be anything close to heroism, look for it in the muddy context of ordinarity. For heroic deeds emerge from everyday life.Like Nietzsche dismantled the existence of a living God, and encourages us to confront the seeming horror of His death in order to set ourselves free, Joyce in Ulysses fillets our delusional hope for The Exceptional. Whether struggling with Olympians, searching for a Holy Grail or just out on the town for the length of one day, we all think our silly, disturbing, unrelated thoughts. We can be generous, compassionate, involved and inspired. And we know violence, prejudice, narcissism, envy and a whole range of petty egotistical and shortminded sensations from within; we all need to relieve ourselves in more than one way and we all just go on with whatever it is we were doing once we were finished. Joyce is the first to wonder why all the trivialities were left out from the stories of old. How can anyone ever really relate to a hero lacking the most primal human idiosyncracies, let alone live up to his standards?I noticed that a lot of people who've read it encourage us to read Ulysses as a sort of literary comedy. I disagree with that. Yes, it can be quirky, it has wit, irony and sarcasm, funny, creative wordplay and it is not hard to find something to smile about on every page if that's what you're looking for (just looking at yourself struggling to make sense of it all should crack you up), but in it's core this is a profound book about compassion and love for mankind. With all its flaws. If that's too raw for you, if you are not prepared to let go of the Heroic Dream that our tradition has carefully been constructing ever since the tale of Gilgamesh up to his modern day equivalents, the idols of popular culture, than Ulysses can't be anything but obscene.With that regard I see a straight line from James Joyce to the rogue story tellers of our time. These days (anti-)heroes are perpetually encountering the trivialities of life, be it Woody Allens constant neurotic babble and a (poorly masked) libido or the insignificant fascinations of Quentin Tarantino's tough guys that live in front of a backdrop of branding and advertising.I'm not going to say this is my favourite book. There were times that I've cursed it. But I did love living in it. Sometimes it was torture, and I felt so lost. But: to read Ulysses is to study Ulysses. I combined reading the Everyman's edition with a dutch translation and also kept the internet at hand. I had to take heed not to get lost in the labyrinth of annotations and hold course. But I also wanted to make sure not to miss out on too much of the subtext. Navigating between Scylla and Charibdis indeed! Exploring footnotes and episode reviews enhanced my experience and helped me to catch my breath when necessary. Reading Ulysses is really like being out on your own, caught in a literary variation of Odysseus travels. Like your fellow exile, you will find yourself seriously considering to give in or give up, telling yourself you're probably too stupid to pull this off or coming up with a thousand better reasons to spend your precious time. These are the temptations you're dealing with on the quest you've embarked on: sirens calling out to you from every corner to keep you from finding your way home and bringing in your ship. But when in doubt, always remember: if a two-dimensional hero can do it, why not you? And lo, there is joy, waiting at the close!To Leopold Bloom, to Molly and Stephen and to early 20th century Dublin: I'll be missing you terribly...

I found it to be extremely difficult to read so I am unable to give an opinion on the book.Hope you have better luck.

I'm reading 'Ulysses' because my MA in modernist literature demands it. But that's not to say that I'm not enjoying the challenge of ploughing through one of the most indecipherable books in history. And it really is indecipherable. For the first time in my literary career (and I've read a LOT of books), I've had to resort to reading the Cliffs Notes alongside the original, just to try and get a handle on what's going on. And a lot of the time it just feels like I'm reading word after word, but have no idea what they all mean when they're strung together. It's true that it makes it a 'little' easier if you read the book outloud, but frankly, 1) it takes twice as long and 2) my boyfriend was getting fed up of me drivelling on at home about Bloom and his long-winded defecations (and I don't blame him!) - and that's without commenting on the funny looks I got on the bus.I admit I haven't yet finished 'Ulysses' - I'm currently on chapter 10, of 18. It does at times feel like I'm never going to get through it, although I'm determined to finish it - I see it as a mountain to climb, and I know I'll be pleased with myself when I get to the end, in 500+ pages! But I'd be a big fat fibber if I said I'd enjoyed a single page of it... so far.Personally, I don't think that reading 'Ulysses' will add anything to your appreciation or otherwise of contemporary literature. It's an exceedingly preposterous and pretentious tome, and Joyce clearly had one intention when he wrote it - to cause controversy and incite argument. And judging by the reviews on Amazon alone, he's certainly succeeded. However, I was disappointed to read in The Guardian last week (in a flippant article about the new set texts for school curriculums) that Joyce didn't get a look in (for any of his books) and they they didn't think he'd care. Of course he'd care... otherwise what's the point of writing a book in the first place?

It took me more than 2 months to read this. It's a book which left me with markedly ambivalent feelings - ranging from sheer pleasure at some of the beautiful language used, frustration when I failed to understand what was going on, irritability at what seemed at times pretentiousness & deliberate obscurity, surprise at the power of some of the eroticism and laughter at moments of farce. There are parts which read relatively easily (at least on the surface) and others which are so dense and multilayer-ed that repeated readings are required (& even then the meanings are elusive).Knowledge of a wide range of literature and political sources would seem essential and I'm not well enough versed. It was a long time since I read "portrait of the artist", but fresher knowledge would have helped with many of the characters here. Similarly, a more recent refresher of the Odyssey, and Hamlet...I found the annotations in this book mostly very helpful - in providing an overview of the themes of each chapter (which often I didn't quite follow) as well as decoding some of the more obscure parts and providing historical footnotes. Without this scholarly but accessible commentary, I think my enjoyment of the text would have been considerably less. Mind you, I was still left feeling that I should re-read the book at some future point - but life's too short!