Friday, October 22, 2010
So it begins...
How do we tackle Ulysses? When we read War & Peace we broke the book down into each small section and tabbed it with Post-It note pieces. Having frequent stopping points to mark progress was a good way to approach a daunting novel. We are using a similar approach with Ulysses. We marked off natural stopping points within the formal sections. Ulysses will still be difficult, I expect. The annotation books should arrive from amazon.com any day now. Have I ever read Ulysses? No, but I've read the first 3 pages.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
New Season!!
Time flies and I can't believe how long it has been since I posted anything to this blog. Inactivity is the kiss of death to a blog so it's a good thing this a singular purpose blog. The virtual leaves are changing here in SW Florida and it is time to do our Fall/Winter online book discussion. Once again I reminded Erica that our patron, David, has powered his way through more of the Modern Library top 100 novels than we have.
So...having conquered War & Peace, I have set the challenge to read the Modern Library's #1 pick, James Joyce's Ulysses. Erica was not, at first, convinced until I told her it was only 258 pages (gigantic lie, she's very gullible). Once she learned the truth, the deal we struck is that we will read Ulysses now, followed by Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
We will be reading the novel accompanied by the Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses [Revised and Expanded Edition], which I bought from amazon.com. The reviews I read indicated that in order to understand/appreciate this book we need annotations. Just as we did with War & Peace, we are tabbing the book at intervals to give us good stopping points and to help give a sense of progress. The goal is Ulysses by Christmas.
Please join us in this book, if you would like. Feel free to comment without reading, as you wish. We have no idea how we will do. Will we enjoy it, get it, understand the fuss? The beauty of not reading Ulysses for a literature class is that if we struggle, we struggle; we will finish, however!
So...having conquered War & Peace, I have set the challenge to read the Modern Library's #1 pick, James Joyce's Ulysses. Erica was not, at first, convinced until I told her it was only 258 pages (gigantic lie, she's very gullible). Once she learned the truth, the deal we struck is that we will read Ulysses now, followed by Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
We will be reading the novel accompanied by the Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses [Revised and Expanded Edition], which I bought from amazon.com. The reviews I read indicated that in order to understand/appreciate this book we need annotations. Just as we did with War & Peace, we are tabbing the book at intervals to give us good stopping points and to help give a sense of progress. The goal is Ulysses by Christmas.
Please join us in this book, if you would like. Feel free to comment without reading, as you wish. We have no idea how we will do. Will we enjoy it, get it, understand the fuss? The beauty of not reading Ulysses for a literature class is that if we struggle, we struggle; we will finish, however!
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