Welp, friends, we made it through all eleventy billion pages of Ulysses and are the better for it. (Better Read than Dead 1, Mayor Pete 0.) And we all agree that the second half of the book is delightful. From Chapter 15 (“Circe”), a 150-page play about… kink? the nation? gender? all of that? to Chapter 17’s catechism, wherein Bloom and Dedalus pee together in true Hegelian mutual recognition, to Chapter 18 (“Penelope”), where we finally get to spend some time in Molly Bloom’s head (best character in the book -- we very much stan). We have more thoughts on form and stream of consciousness, and more thoughts on which character is the drunkest, and we have some great conversation about sexuality in this novel. AND -- we play a fun little round of “which extremely NSFW love letter did James Joyce write?”
As before, we suggest you get the Gabler edition, which is both suitably bulky to convey your gravitas (Big Joyce Energy) and is pretty much the standard these days. For more on Joyce, modernism, and psychoanalysis, we highly recommend Maud Ellmann’s The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud.
Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.