Ulysses

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Summary: This book is unintelligable.
Review: I can not see why everyone thinks this book is so great. It reminds me of modern art, where a so called artist splashes paint on a canvas in ten minutes and then passes it off as a masterpiece. It probably took Joyce less time to write this novel than it took me to read it. If my grade hadn't depended on it, I would have put it down after ten minutes.

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Summary: Ulysses is the ultimate book about Dublin
Review: When I first read Ulysses as an Eng.Lit. student in the 1960's, I knew I had to become a creative writer. Ulysses is my vade-mecum. When I am having problems writing a novel, or am dissatisfied with reviews, I turn to Joyce's masterpiece and gain fresh hope and inspiration. This is the book to beat all books - the Book of books. I never work on Bloomsday: I go down to Davy Byrnes public house in the centre of Dublin and order what Leopold had. Ulysses is not a difficult work, but it's very funny and very,very human.

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Summary: Such a wretched waste of time
Review: Yes, ULYSSES is a mainstay of college literature. Yes, the book is a worthy literary endeavor. But for those who are not brutally devoted to the endless pursuit of mind-numbing genius, ULYSSES is tiresome, tedious, and passe. The appeal of reading the mind wanderings of a pasty, weak pseudo-intellectual grows stale after the first dozen pages. For those enterprising readers such as myself who feel guilty dumping a Joyce work after only a chapter, read on. It gets worse. Confession: the genius mind-maze that is Joyce is sometimes just not worth exploring. One would have better luck escaping the Minotaur than successfully exiting this lingual labyrinth. (Dr. Marcus Smith: I apologize for this heresy against the Modern Epic.)

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Summary: 1 in a million
Review: This book went to become a bible for 20th century style and stories. It can not be just read 1 time and then laid away. Actually it must be reread 10 times and even then one will never be able to understand everything. People who say this book is easy to read or even suitable for a 17 year old are perfectly wrong. You definitely need a very deep background and you should have acquainted other masters before. Anthony Burgess said that the Ulysses will never be fully understood just like life.

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Summary: Modern Epic
Review: When read by those looking for prose, they go away disappointed. When read by those seeking poetry, they can't put it down. I gave up trying to figure out what was going on about four hours into the marathon reading I went to at the Irish Times in DC on Bloomsday 1991. The words, though. The words kept me there for many, many more hours (and just a few pints). Imagery started leaping out at me, I felt as if I was hallucinating. Not for the timid, weak, or close-minded, but worth the effort if you want to give yourself up to a good book.

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Summary: Beyond compare
Review: Intimidating? Yes. Time consuming? Certainly. Difficult? Without question. Worthwhile? Absulutely. This is the book that changed all books. By the end, you know Mr Leopold Bloom better than you know your best friend. It is funny, challenging, insightful and heartbreaking. Joyce's efforts dwarf the genius of his contemporaries (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tolstoy) and make their work read like apprentices imitating the master. If there is the possibility of perfection in a work of literature, Joyce has come closer than anyone else with Ulysses.

Rating:
Summary: Bring a sharp knife
Review: Imagine a knot the size of Iowa, with as many strands as that fair state has swine (though several thousand times its mean I.Q.). Imagine that knot thicker than a fully loaded burrito. Imagine trying to unravel said knot--or hack through it, if you didn't edit the OED or master a dozen languages in college. There. You've just imagined Ulysses.

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Summary: Read a different edition first
Review: Unfortunately, the first edition of *Ulysses* to be published in Dublin is not the edition of this book which anyone should read first. Danis Rose's decisions to normalize punctuation and spelling, to make intrusions into Joyce's prose on the basis of his own criteria of syntactic and semantic coherence rather than on textual evidence, and to re-insert apostrophes into Penelope (although he prints an alternate version of the chapter in an appendix) are only barely justifiable in terms of his own theory of editing -- and entirely alien to the "normal" practices of scholarly textual critics. This is quite a shame, because some of Rose's work on the manuscript evidence (as it is described in his introduction, quite interesting in itself) might potentially be of great importance to the textual study of *Ulysses*. Without an apparatus criticus, however, no one can tell for sure. Although (as Rose himself points out) there is and can be no absolutely "definitive" *Ulysses*, there are better places to start. Read Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 edition, keeping in mind its limitations (or, if you want a student's edition with good notes in the volume, use the reprint of the 1922 first edition, edited by Jeri Johnson for OUP, taking care to check out some of the more important alternate readings in Gabler's text). For those interested, a forthcoming issue of *James Joyce Quarterly* will include extensive discussion of Rose's edition and its merits.

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Summary: wonderful!
Review: The single most influential novel of the twentieth century. Glorious, all encompassing, touching, extremely funny, unforgettable...simply sit back relax and let your eye and mind takeover...the "ineluctable modality of the visible"...and be amazed. Faulkner went to Paris to gawk at him, Hemmingway described it as the "most goddamned wonderful book" he knew. And it is.

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Summary: a shabby edition of a literary monument
Review: Ulysses is one of my very favorite books. Even though I've read the novel many times, I'm not qualified to compare this new edition to its predecessors: I'm a commercial artist, not a literary scholar. I AM qualified, however, to complain about how badly produced this book is. Professor Rose refers in his intro to the important influence that editors, designers and printers have on a text. Careful analysis of those influences are the basis of the method he used to create this new edition. Well, too bad he wasn't able to influence the publisher. This edition of Ulysses is printed on very cheap paper -- the kind of dim gray brittle stuff that the cheapest of romance fiction is printed on. Fine for a book that will be read once, but terrible for a "Reader's Edition" of a classic that will be reread and annotated. These pages will be badly discolored in a few years. The typography is mediocre, too: the title page looks like the Bad Example in any design textbook. The newspaper-style headlines in the "Aeolus" chapter are barely readable -- of course the ink spread on that awful paper doesn't help. If you read this, Professor Rose, I'm sorry your efforts were presented so poorly.