Ulysses Kindle Edition

If you've ever sought a book as big as a suitcase, then this would be the one to acquire. When I received my first book from Amazon by E. M Cioran, and the typescript on the last pages was all askew, and these same pages were actually uncut at the top, I said nothing, although I knew there was something amiss. Now it is apparent that Amazon allows sub-standard publishers to knock off classics on what seems like, Xerox printers. It is also quite difficult to ferret out which reviews are meant towards which particular publication, since each is completely identical. So I took a chance, and lost. Let us hope I don't get a hernia lugging this monstrosity around, and more importantly, that all the content which belongs, is there.

I bought this copy of "Ulysses" to use in my Intellectual Movements (Modernism) course. I bought it because it was cheap and Prime eligible, but it still turned out to be a complete waste of money. Not only is this book impractically huge, making it a nightmare to lug around campus in a backpack only containing a laptop and two notebooks, but the layout is ridiculous. "Ulysses" was written with four parts and eighteen chapters and has line numbers as it is not exactly prose.Looking at the various editions that my classmates had I can say with confidence that every other edition I saw had, at the very least, the chapters and parts labeled, if not the lines. This copy had no chapters nor line numbers. The parts were labeled, and at first, I thought the heading for Part One, which was only a roman numeral, to be the first chapter, so I read until I got to Part Two, which I mistakenly presumed to be the second chapter. When we were instructed to skip over chapter two and go straight to chapter three, I panicked when I could not find the third chapter after skipping through several pages. The layout of the book was no help, as there were no page or paragraph breaks to indicate where a chapter might start or end in sight, and there was no table of contents to indicate page numbers for each chapter.Once I figured out that this edition only had the parts labeled and had no chapter headings and no line numbers, I realized that I had wasted valuable money and time on a completely useless edition. Don’t buy this book. Instead, I’d recommend buying The Gabler Edition. It does cost more new, but it is also available through Prime and has all the parts it’s supposed to have. Save yourself the extra pain and just buy this edition instead. Here’s the ISBN: 978-0394743127

Why does this book so consistently make lists of books that must be read before one shuffles off one's mortal coil? Sure, it's hip and edgy for its day. But the disjointed, "stream of consciousness" tactic becomes tedious. Hard to follow. Lost interest - any "pay off" is not worth the copious amounts of time it would take to finish this thing. If this is Joyce's finest work, he is, indeed, overrated.

Ulysses is a difficult book to read, and a difficult book to review. I first read Ulysses during the winter of 2004-2005. The reading took three months. A slog, but I felt it was my duty. I re-read Ulysses during the summer of 2005 to see if I missed something the first time through. It didn’t seem that I missed anything, and the mud had thinned slightly. I wasn’t sure if that progress was worth the effort, though. Two years later, I read it a third time, for no particular reason, and I discovered something. I was living alone at the time (a long story) and I had the house to myself. With no one to disturb, I read Ulysses aloud to my living room. Bingo! The story opened up, the mud ran clear, Leopold Bloom spent the day on the streets of Dublin, the night (eventually) at home with his wife Molly, and I can give this novel 5 stars.

This hugely admired novel is also one of the least read It is long, of course, and from time to time a bit obscure. What surprised me is that it includes long passages that are wildly comic. I hope people will read this masterwork without being intimidated by its reputation, without worry about passages that are difficult to grasp precisely, and with the joy and essence of Ireland. Just keep reading.

This is for the Shrine Classics print copy of Ulysses (ISBN 978-1505297546). This was a horrible printing of an already complex text. I needed to find a copy for my class and prefer to have print copies than online versions. However, this print version did not have the sections of text identified (I couldn't find episode 18 "Penelope" without having to search for it first online AND THEN try to hunt it down in the book). There were many random typos as well (such as a lot of e's randomly placed in the text) and overall the quality of this book was NOT worth the time nor the money I spent on it. I am very upset with this purchase and will avoid buying "Shrine Classics" versions of texts in the future.

James Joyce's complex novel is still fascinating after almost a century. The author's gifted sketching of complete characters amazes the reader now as it must have when it was first published almost a century ago. Scandalous in early twentieth century, not so much now but still highly entertaining . And the language ! Through Joyce's uncanny skill, one can hear his characters' lilting Irish voices and partake of their gossipy exchanges. Joyce's political ideas and his jibes at Irish Catholic religion are largely forgettable now, but Molly Bloom and Stephen Daedalus will live long in your memory.