Part II

I never thought I'd say it, but Ulysses is getting better. Having reached Part II, The Bloom section, I am much relieved! I know almost all of the words, it is predominately in English, there is punctuation, and the text is most like a novel. Fancy that! By using the Gifford Annotated, e-notes with my e-version at home, and Cliffs Notes, I may get through this by Christmas. My goal is to make it to the first tab of Part II during dinner.

First 25

I have read the first 25 pages of Ulysses, more by the time I am actually typing this. In truth, then, I am reading Ulysses. I eagerly await the day when I can say, "I have read Ulysses" because this undertaking is no beach read. My annotated volume arrived, much to my relief, and I have gone back through the notes of what I have read to get current. Jeepers! I'm reminded of some of my uncle's poetry. The poems were so word/idea complex that his footnotes ran for many more pages than the poems themselves.

I keep reminding myself that our patron read it so I should be able to. I mentioned to Erica that there were words I didn't know and proper nouns that I wasn't sure if they were people or places. Finally I saw the word, "valise" and was so excited..."suitcase...it means suitcase!!!" I know a word!!! This will be a long voyage, I fear.

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.

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!

Comments

Recently this blog along with two others I write have been plagued by Anonymous comments that are irrelevant to the associated posts. To combat these spam-like contributions, I have changed the settings on the blog to require registration for anyone wishing to comment. I apologize for any inconvenience this requirement may cause.

I still love 1984

It has been a little over a decade since I read 1984. I am a huge Orwell fan and have read many if not most of his works. I read 1984 way after that year...it was in the mid 90s when I was assigned this reading. I remember a deep sense of dread and impending doom. I understand it more now than when I was in high school. I believe that it is something I should probably read every 10 years.

Personally, I find it very amusing how everyone uses the term 1984 these days but many people do not understand the full scope of the novel. They just say "Big Brother" as if 1984 is solely about loss of privacy and having government involved in your life. It is about so much more...it is about individualism and totalitarianism, information freedom and control, torture both psychological and physical, as well as the importance of language. I read this book and I think of North Korea. How the government controls information and you hear about North Koreans who escape are shocked that the rest of the world is not like NK and everything they ever learned was wrong.

In essence, I still love 1984 even though my heart hurts when I read it. So I will end my post with 3 words...Information IS power!

In the End

Last weekend I finished the book. In my old insomnia days, I used to fall asleep to tapes and one of my favorites (before I had all of the Prairie Home Companions) was a BBC Radio production of 1984. Reading the book after all of these years was interesting because I could hear the radio actors' voices speaking many of the lines in my head. I am also curious to see the film again, not having seen it since it was released in 1984. What's to say about this book? I like the term "negative utopia," I prefer Brave New World, and I was reminded how much I don't like gin. Anyone care to weigh in on anything?