Ulysses

By James Joyce

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Ulysses is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. It was not easy to find a publisher in America willing to take it on, and when Jane Jeap and Margaret Anderson started printing extracts from the book in their literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, they were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. They were fined $100, and even The New York Times expressed satisfaction with their conviction. Ulysses was not published in book form until 1922, when another American woman, Sylvia Beach, published it in Paris her Shakespeare & Company. Ulysses was not available legally in any English-speaking country until 1934, when Random House successfully defended Joyce against obscenity charges and published it in the Modern Library. This edition follows the complete and unabridged text as corrected and reset in 1961. Judge John Woolsey's decision lifting the ban against Ulysses is reprinted, along with a letter from Joyce to Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House, and the original foreword to the book by Morris L. Ernst, who defended Ulysses during the trial.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9780679641629

James Joyce

James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish poet, novelist, and short story writer, considered to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. His most famous works include Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Reviews for Ulysses

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh, that, "apathy of the stars." I am wistful and amazed.

P.S. I have since read texts by Julian Rios and Enrique Vila-Matas who devoted novelistic approaches to Ulysses that ultimately steer the reader back to Bloom and Dedalus. I know of no other groundswell that continues to percolate and excite.

[benfulton · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well worth wading through, if you have some annotations or at least Cliff's Notes on hand - at the very least to pick up on the references that don't make any sense to anyone who wasn't living in Dublin in 1916. The analogy that Joyce draws between the journeys of Odysseus to a day in the life of one ordinary man is very powerful, even though we work backwards through his life and at the end we probably know more about Leopold Bloom than perhaps any character in any book. The streams of consciousness that comprise most of the book seem appropriate to get a clear feel for Bloom's state of mind, and the play style of the hallucinogenic Circe scene works well. Perhaps the climaxes of the book occur when the ghosts of their dead loved ones visit both Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. But Joyce also drops in what appear to be random styles of writing, particularly in the Cyclops chapter, and the question-answer style of Ithaca is fairly difficult to follow. Does it add to the book? Not that I can see. There are also constant lists of what appear to be nothing in particular; other conspiracy-minded books (Focault's Pendulum, Illuminatus) hint at their respect for Joyce and provide similar lists; coupled with the coded letters that Bloom writes in the book I think it's pretty likely that at least some of the lists contain secret messages. Bloom is clearly a Freemason - I don't see how anyone could say otherwise. I didn't take the trouble to try to translate the messages but it seems a pretty good bet that the key to the code is in the line N. IGS./WI.UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y. IM., which is the coded address of the woman to whom Bloom sends letters.The long stream-of-consciousness of Molly Bloom that ends the book is also very telling concerning Bloom; a look at him through the eyes of the person who probably knows him better than anyone else. I'm not sure I find the hints of reconcilation convincing, but I don't see that a divorce or angry recriminations are in the Blooms' future either. And I'd be surprised if our Everyman hero ever has a huge resolution, or third act, an end to his drama, because I think that is precisely what Joyce tries to avoid. His hero will remain ambiguous forever. And in the end, isn't that what we really can expect?

[eoin-311239 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

6stars? 100? My favorite book? Kinda. The book I've read the most? Definitely. This is a book you can read 10, 20 times and get something new out of it each time. There are dozens of books written about this book, and they add something too, but the thing itself is (really) thoroughly enjoyable. Still shocking in form after all these years, this is as good as a novel can be.

[dirkjohnson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This recording is better than I ever would have imagined. A superb job by the readers.

[tommi180744 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Inside the cover of this Second Hand copy a previous owner has written "June 2013, Got to page 12 Only". In some way it is the ultimate literary critique.I first read Joyce's book as a callow youth in my first year at Uni: Couldn't get into it - a way too intellectual, too self-indulgently, unleashing that 'stream of consciousness' prose style for my patience & understanding in that era of my life.Bought & read a copy in my thirties (decades ago) - it made much more sense, but there were still whole passages of Joyce's lyrical gallivanting with the English language that still had me perplexed & irritated.So, here am I (retired, time to take an in-depth, considered view on the alleged masterpiece) and read its 680 pages: Verdict - it's a damn clever piece of writing that really stretches the boundaries of word-play and its visionary erudition challenges almost every concept of what constitutes a literary novel - Joyce is extremely talented & this tome about one day bristles with extraneous vivid idiosyncratic bouts of words in scenes that need the most intense concentration to make sense of them: Is all that effort worthwhile? Is it genius at work?I'm not clever enough to make a judgement: I do know it figures in the top25 of most 'great' literature lists - BUT, for me it doesn't make my personal top50 'great reads' & there I suppose is something of the difference between the literary critics and the much wider, less intellectual readership of novels - if a reader struggles to make head or tail with many of the passages then that is NOT a 'great' read and nor is it necessarily an important literary read.James Joyce's Ulysses can be judged, I suspect, as TOO CLEVER BY HALF for many of us!

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I signed up for a lecture on how to enjoy reading Ulysses, and eagerly bought the book. I decided to start reading a few pages before the lecture....got to page 60 (of 933) and was notified that the seminar was cancelled! Nonetheless, I decided to proceed without professional help.The novel takes place over a single day as we follow Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dadelus on their meanderings in Dublin. There isn't much plot; the book is a character study of Bloom, modeled after Odysseus, and also an exploration of writing techniques to show how different ways of telling a story change the perspective of the reader and the characters themselves. It was more enjoyable than I'd expected and, several days having passed since I finished it, I am still coming to appreciate aspects of Leopold Bloom's character that I may have missed. Hard to rate....it's a masterpiece of style for sure, but sometimes confusing and so long!

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an experimental novel for it’s time that follows a Dublin school teacher, Stephen Daedalus through the events of June 16th, 1904. It is a pretty ordinary day. The cast of characters is large, with Molly Bloom and her husband Leopold dwelt on quite thoroughly. To sum up this is a major classic of English literature, and quite fun to read. First Published February 2, 1922.inished January 18th, 1971.

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are portals of discovery."This novel has a remarkably simple story. It traces the paths of two characters on a single day in 1904 Dublin. Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged, Jewish man and Stephen Daedalus, a young intellectual.Bloom spends the day in the knowledge that his wife, Molly, is probably spending her day at home entertaining her lover. He spends the morning attending the funeral of a friend who had died suddenly whilst Stephen in contrast, spends his morning teaching before moving on to a newspaper office, a public library and finally a maternity ward where the two men's paths cross. Stephen invites Bloom to join him and some friends on a drunken spree, visiting a notorious brothel along the way and ends with Bloom inviting him back to his house, where they spend a number of hours talking and drinking coffee.In the final chapter, Bloom slips back into bed with his wife, Molly, and we get a final monologue from her point of view. This book is a notoriously difficult read and in fact resides in number 1 position on Goodreads '100 most difficult books to finish list'. It is not it's length, nearly 700 pages in my case, but Joyce's writing style that makes it so much hard work. In fact I was tempted on more than one occasion to abandon it. Firstly it is largely written in a stream-of-consciousness manner which whilst allowing the author to portray a unique perspective on the events, it also requires a fair bit of concentration and perseverance. But Joyce isn't content with finishing there. He also employs several other narrative and linguistic techniques. For example, he employs phonic representation in one chapter whilst another is laid out like a play. Joyce is trying to show is that there are more than one way to tell a story. The final chapter returns to the stream-of-consciousness process and is virtually devoid of any punctuation marks.Ulysses's experimental literary structure makes it a powerful but also incredibly taxing piece of work and whilst I am glad that I finally got around to reading I cannot in truth say that I particularly enjoyed it.

[mattries37315 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The life of the everyman in a single day in Dublin is the basic premise of James Joyce’s Ulysses, yet this is an oversimplification of the much deeper work that if you are not careful can quickly spiral down into a black hole of fruitless guesswork and analysis of what you are reading.Joyce’s groundbreaking work is a parallel to Homer’s The Odyssey though in a modernist style that was defined by Joyce in this novel. Though the primary character is Leonard Bloom, several other important secondary characters each take their turn in the spotlight but it is Bloom that the day revolves around. However any echoes of Homer are many times hidden behind Joyce verbosity and stream-of-conscious writing that at times makes sense and at times completely baffles you. Even with a little preparation the scale of what Joyce forces the reader to think about is overwhelming and frankly if you’re not careful, quickly derails your reading of the book until its better just to start skimming until the experience mercifully ends.While my experience and opinion of this work might be lambasted by more literary intelligent reviewers, I would like to caution those casual readers like myself who think they might be ready to tackle this book. Read other modernist authors like Conrad, Kafka, Woolf, Lawrence, and Faulkner whose works before and after the publication of Ulysses share the same literary movement but are not it’s definitive work.

[antao-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I started off thinking Ulysses was a pile of incoherent drivel, even though I'd never got past the first page. At 20 I would sit in the uni bar getting pissed and slagging off literary types and lecturers who mentioned it (some of them were pretentious posers; some of them weren't). At 30 I decided to put up or shut up by actually reading it so that I could explain why it was incoherent drivel. The result was that I was drawn into it and have read it five times cover-to-cover. Like a lot of challenging literature, it requires a bit of life experience to get into.The funniest bit in 'Ulysses' is when he's browsing a second hand book store for a book for his wife. As nice as she is, Bloom obviously knows she's not really on his intellectual/reading level. He decides to look for the kind of romance, Mills&Boon, type books for her. In the whole novel of course, the narrative style has it that the description of action, his thoughts, what he's reading, and his speech are all rolled together in the same syntax. So it's funny when he comes across a book, flicks to a random page and it says something like 'and she wore her finest gowns for him, she would do anything, for Raoul', and he just pisses himself, deciding there and then:“This is it. This is the book. This one.”Then a few pages later, the quote crops up again in his mind (much like things come back to us after a while when doing something completely unrelated) and he laughs about it again. A very interesting outline of the psychological process.Random thoughts:- Interestingly enough, Joyce was very influenced in on the porno-lit side, by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz. Joyce was a diagnosed schizo, which disease, at the beginning, made for one of the world's great Kustwerke, Ulysses, but in its way-out stages made for his garbled nonsense, "Finnegans Wake", as well. There is, really, too much of a good thing. Too much mouse running up your clock, jumbles up your hickorydickory beyond comprehension;- To me "Ulysses" is still the #1 laugh-out-loud novel of all time, worth every minute of effort---and the best critical intro is still Ellmann's relatively small but high-impact "Ulysses on the Liffey." Read that first and you'll instantly enjoy 90% of the tough parts. Still laughing about the Irishman dragged away for setting a cathedral on fire. "I'm bloody sorry I did it," says he, "but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was in there."- How could you not love Leopold Bloom? He talks to his cat. He eats with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, which "give to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine". He wonders if it would be possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub. He surreptitiously observes the marble goddesses in the lobby of the National Museum to see if they have anuses. He buys pornographic novels for his wife, masturbates on a public beach without getting caught, and picks the winner at Ascot without even trying. The most endearing character in all literature.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A brilliant book to read and reread, but not a book to love with the heart, more with the brains. Great variety in styles, themes, some experiments are a succes, others not. This is not about Dublin on 1 day, by 1 person, no, on the contrary, the multiple points of view are essential! It's kind of cubustic view on reality. A few of the topics Joyce touches: what is truth, what is reality? How can you know reality? And how, as a human, can you cope with this reality?

[dreamingtereza_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Utterly perfect.

[cecrow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thoughts made narrative; Odyssey-reflecting themes, coupled with a different narrative style for every episode and a boatload of rhetorical devices (did Joyce leave out any?); reversions to historical literary styles; obscure references to Catholic and Irish and Jewish tradition, Irish politics and history, and a wide scattering of other things ... 700 pages of this, and still we cover no more than eighteen hours of a rather ordinary day in Dublin: June 16th, 1904. An absolutely brilliant novel, but I needed help to understand it. I relied on the Wikipedia outline and Sparknotes chapter summaries, two among many references available. Much of this novel is written in the language of the daydreamer, not restricted to interior thoughts that move a plot forward but open to capturing every thought that might pass through the consciousness of these characters as they go about their day. The sheer volume and range of this delivery turns a nothing-special morning and afternoon into an epic. Joyce is lambasted for writing over most people's heads, but he isn't doing it in a bullying or non-inclusive way - else why are there enough body function references to entertain a toddler? Some of his characters' thoughts, particularly Stephen's, can be learned in the extreme but are interspersed with the most casual, mundane passing fancies. Everything and nothing is important. All people are capable of every kind of thought up and down the scale of decorum, and all of us are riding that scale on a daily basis. These are the most realistic characters ever put to paper, and I'm ready to believe nobody will ever do it better.What I don't believe is that Ulysses is worthwhile reading for anyone who doesn't come to it of their own volition. Forget the critics, the professors who are paid to help you appreciate it. It's only good reading if you think it is. Approach Joyce via Dubliners and Portrait first to see if you can enjoy him at all, and catch up on Homer's epics. If those are a hassle or boring (and whether you understand them is beside the point), don't trouble yourself any further because all you're going to miss here is an exercise in frustration with his madness (exactly why I'm not going to read the Wake). But if you liked all of that and what Joyce can do, his prior work pales next to the technical feats he pulled off with Ulysses.

[tgamble54 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Impenetrable

[delta351 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was able to knock this out in about 5 weeks, on my first try. I used an old copy of A Reader's Guide to James Joyce by Wm Tyndall for reference, along w Sparknotes. If I could only have one book on a deserted island, this would prob be it.Still quite confused by the whole book. Each chapter having a different writing style is a bit unsettling. It is imperative to read it until the end, because the last two chapters really give you perspective. I read most of it on a Kindle, and kept pace in a Gabler edition.My favorite character was Bloom. What a whack job, what a silly man. Stephen didn't do much for me. Have to process the story a bit more, because it was intense. JJ makes up some crazy/funny words.

[amzzz_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I know this is supposed to be one of the greatest books of all time, but goodness did I struggle to get through it! Even when I was done I must admit I barely had a clue what had happened.

[maxernst11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A brilliant book to read and reread, but not a book to love with the heart, more with the brains. Great variety in styles, themes, some experiments are a succes, others not. This is not about Dublin on 1 day, by 1 person, no, on the contrary, the multiple points of view are essential! It's kind of cubustic view on reality. A few of the topics Joyce touches: what is truth, what is reality? How can you know reality? And how, as a human, can you cope with this reality?

[richardderus · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Cacotechnous humbuggery.

[cliffburns · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

WOW!Nuff said.

[gary237 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Ulysses" by James Joyce (1934) is a novel about the interaction of social responsibility and personal desires. It focuses primarily on three characters: Stephen Dedalus a self-absorbed scholar attempting to find his artistic voice, Leopold Bloom who tries to meet his social responsibilities in a culture that is not completely accepting of him, and Molly Bloom (Poldy's wife) who struggles with her feminine destiny. The novel parallels the structure of Homer's "Odyssey" that chronicles the 10 year struggle of Odysseus to return from war in Troy to his home in Ithaca. Ulysses, the Latin translation of the Greek name Odysseus, is Leopold (Poldy) Bloom who travels the streets of Dublin one Thursday on June 16, 1904. His goal is to accomplish his daily task of meeting his family's economic needs, forming social alliances with Dubliners (including Stephen), and satisfying his own drives for understanding and fulfillment. Odysseus sought to reunite with his wife and assess her fidelity in his absence, and Bloom looks forward to the end of the day when he returns to his home at 7 Eccles Street, concerned about his wife's unfaithfulness. "Ulysses" is remarkable in its descriptive detail of the physical and psychological environments of Dublin and its characters. The feelings related to immersion in the living Irish city are so strong that there may be some irrational fear of being unable to return to current life. The entrance into the reality of the lives of Stephen, Molly, and Poldy is uncanny as readers become physically and psychically connected to characters. It is a matter of proximity. You lose your own personality as you accompany these people when they converse, walk the streets, visit stores, drink and philosophize, reveal themselves in stream of consciousness monologues, argue, pursue bacchanalian extremes, and have private battles with loss and melancholy. The reader `sees' everything that day, the external locations and the inner worlds of the characters, with the "ineluctable modality of the visible." This is the direct and complete experience of Joyce's art without the restriction of our own frame of reference, history, obligations, and wants. It is intimidating to realize that your own life is changing, that part of your personal history now contains a new day of your own existence - you have extended your life for a day. Many people throughout the world celebrate a second birthday on June 16 (Bloomsday). After publication of "Ulysses," I believe that James Joyce (like a few other artists) spent the rest of his life amazed at his creation. As he lay dying in hospital waiting for his wife to return to his bedside, he had to wonder where his inspiration originated, where he summoned the ability to give the gift of another day of life to us all. The reader can benefit most from "Ulysses" by preparing to read it. Read (re-read) Homers "Odyssey." Pay close attention to the structure, the symbolic content, and the psychology of Odysseus. Odysseus was a flawed hero, externally brave but also self-serving and blind to parts of his own personality (like Bloom). Use "Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford to help guide you through the detail of theology, philosophy, psychology, history, rhetoric, and the physical layout of Dublin. This reference work is very good because it allows readers to have their own experiences by providing only supplementary content (facts) that help to understand the myriad allusions presented in the text. I suggest that you enjoy the many beautiful styles of prose presented in the 18 episodes pausing to quickly glance at the definitions in your opened copy of "Ulysses Annotated." Then before reading the next episode, go back and read the complete explanatory entries in this reference book. Give yourself a couple of months to enjoy the novel and add this new day to your life.

[jbreedlove_6 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Holy Crap! What a not good book. This was the latest "on the can" book. I read this a page at a time. I am planning on googling its meaning and purpose. But what I did see in this book was the makings of a classic novel. If Joyce wouldn't have been so lazy and used these characters he developed in a plot of some kind. Still, there were flashes of brilliance.

[absurdeist · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I loathe Ulysses the way that most sensible folks loathe the very existence of Bernie Madoff. It's an all encompassing and consuming loathing leaving no room for mercy. In fact, if I were The Blob or a Killer Tomato on the attack, I'd consume every volume of Ulysses extant (and Bernie Madoff) with my acidic, dissolving loathing. I wish the book were still banned and my access to it summarily and arbitrarily denied by Big Brother, so that I wouldn't have wasted my precious, irreplaceable time and energy reading it, is how deep my Ulysses loathing goes. Yes, it's true, reading Ulysses (even just half of this poo poo) feels like being disemboweled (or at least like having bad, painful gas; and that's bad, painful gas when you're stuck inside somewhere with other people and it would be too impolite - even as painful as it is holding it in - to let it rip. Oh yeah?! You think that's tacky and tasteless? Well if the "genius," Joyce, can make fart jokes in Ulysses left and right, why can't anybody else do the same in describing his flatulent, nauseating tome?Worse, reading Ulysses leaves one feeling like they've been had, scammed, rused, abused, conned, pawned, cheated, excreted, duped, nuked, swindled, swizzled, diddled, belittled, hustled, hoaxed, stiffed, tricked, taken to the cleaners or taken for a ride, ripped off royally of everything you've worked hard for your whole life and hold dear. How you like that list, Joyce, you MOTHERF%$#!R?Less painful indeed, having your wisdom teeth extracted with pliers by an orang-utang...and without novocaine, than trying to read Ulysses first page to last.I hated it.

[alexrichman_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Never again

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I went into this book thinking it was going to be a complete slog and I would hate it. But honestly, I wanted to know why was considered a classic. I love Ireland and this is one of the most famous pieces of literature from the country. I think I built it up as being so difficult and horrible in my mind that the reality isn’t quite as scary. Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely a tough ride. There were sections I loved and others I really struggled with. Joyce is undeniably talented; the chapter where he walks the reader through the entire history of the English language proves that. But his style isn’t my favorite and I frequently felt lost in his ramblings.I can’t say enough about the importance of pairing the audio version with the print. I read it that way and it helped so much! Instead of fighting through every single line, I hear a lyrical Irish voice reading the conversations to me. It brings them alive. When one person rambles on about some idea, it feels like I’m listening to a long-winded friend. Then I go back to the print version and find passages that I loved. I look at the layout of each chapter because the styles are unique. I wasn’t a fan of every single chapter and of course it is a strange book with a lot of meandering and stream of consciousness thought, but I was expecting that. I wasn’t expecting the beautiful language or profound reflections of life and death. I particularly love the references and discussions of Shakespeare’s work in chapter 9.There’s a lot of crass humor and sexual descriptions, so I'm not shocked that it was so frequently banned in the past. But each of those sections gives the reader a deeper view into the characters, both how they see themselves and how others see them. I'm also both impressed and often overwhelmed by how many different styles Joyce uses in his writing. Sometimes his parodying something, sometimes it fits a new narrator's point of view, etc. But it always keeps the reader on their toes. The supplemental material in my book explains some of the background on the censorship of the book and includes a letter from Joyce to his Random House publisher. It also includes the monumental 1933 decision to stop people from banning the book in America. The ruling changed the way censorship was approached in our country.I absolutely loved some of the comments from Judge M. Woolsey, the man who made the decision. To me, his summary of the book captures so many of my feelings perfectly. “Ulysses is not an easy book to read or to understand. But there has been much written about it, and in order properly to approach the consideration of it it is advisable to read a number of other books which have now become it’s satellites. The study of Ulysses is, therefore, a heavy task. The reputation of Ulysses in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written.It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns. In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains, as I have mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake.Joyce has attempted — it seems to me, with astonishing success — to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.”------------------------------------The very final episode of the book is a crazy onslaught of thoughts from Bloom’s wife Molly’s point of view. She flits from thing to the next with no real pattern. She is just thinking, so her thoughts are unfiltered. It’s oddly refreshing even if it’s hard to follow. How many of us have had the same thing happen as we randomly think about our day? I could immediately relate. Joyce’s honesty his characters really struck me in the final few chapters. He writes about Bloom’s flaws and fetishes in detail, something that just wasn’t done before. Yet by the close of the book you feel a bit hopeful about his marriage. There was something powerful about that. No matter how gross or strange Bloom was, he might have found his equal in his wife Molly. BOTTOM LINE: Reading Ulysses was an experience. I struggled with it. I was blown away by the lovely language at times and at others I was completely weirded out. I can’t really compare it to anything else and that alone makes it a unique book. I am so glad I read it and I also don’t think I will ever read it again! “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and one livid final flame. What’s left of us then?” “Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer’s heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute.”"Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves". “Still you learn something. See ourselves as others see us.”“Life, love, voyage round your own little world.”

[leong-272719 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have come to my own conclusion that this book is like being presented with a puzzle. Perhaps more like a crossword puzzle. The fun, apparently, is in deciphering it. It has taken me a very long time to work through the book using a combination of Wikipedia and an ebook version with “Whispersync” in order to have someone smarter than me figuring out the lack of punctuation. I’m not going to give up. After a (long) break from it, I will attempt a further investigation via an annotated version. Maybe.

[yvonne.sevignykaiser · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read this to work my way through 100 Greatest Novels List. Most interesting walk through the streets of Dublin.

[matthew.ducmanas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Humbling. Exhausting. Sometimes exhilarating. Often beautiful. This is a novel that puts you in your place. It tries your patience and requires you accept that you'll go large stretches without understanding what's happening. Eyes will glaze over. Attention will wander. But it will reward the reader. There will be points at which the reader will marvel at how deftly Joyce twists and turns the English language. The humanity that busts out of this thing is impressive. The second to last 'chapter' alone is an incredibly powerful piece of writing. Perhaps a bit too erudite for its own good, Ulysses still manages to captivate as often as it obfuscates.

[eadieb-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have been listening to Ulysses off and on for 6 months and I must say that I did enjoy it very much. I may not have understood most of what I was reading but I did enjoy the poetry, the music, the monologues and the characters. It was funny, sad, lyrical, crude, sensitive and blunt. It is a novel that should be read many times and hopefully when I read it again, it will make a little more sense to me. If you haven't read it yet, I suggest you give it a try.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good but I don't know if I would recommend it to anyone. A literary work as a triathlon, demands a lot of the reader. At 800 pages plus it takes patience to stick with and then finish this work. At times coarse and at others heavenly lyrical.

[jlsimon7 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

After having tried multiple times to read this book I decided to look at the reviews. I knew the book to be a masterpiece by repute and added it to my collection expecting to enjoy it. I've tried but I cannot see for a moment why this book has such a reputation. Having now read several reviews I see that I am hardly alone in the determination that this book is as useful as a paper-weight. Going to move on to something else. For those who chose to attempt it, good luck.