Reader discussion: Ulysses

Public reader discussion about Ulysses by James Joyce.

Just finished James Joyce's Ulysses!

By Panther_Cloudy

Seriously, what a rush—took me about 6 months. I’m usually faster than that with books this long (a month, sometimes two if it’s a bit harder). I started back in December as a lockdown thing and now I’m basically ending it while sunbathing in June. I don’t even know how else to put it: this book was unreal and it honestly changed how I feel about reading it. If you’re on the fence, just go for it, but I’d say don’t jump straight into this—start with *Dubliners* and *A Portrait* first. The way Joyce writes is just ridiculous. He sets up these images you can almost see, but not quite, and it’s so layered that it basically hijacks your imagination. There were like 3 times I thought “okay, that’s it,” but I pushed through. Once I got past the tough parts, everything after was way easier, almost like it opened up. I even felt like it “rides” along the way the ocean does in the Odysseus story (and yeah, I’m guessing that’s on purpose). I’m from London and I still haven’t been to Dublin yet, but somehow Joyce makes it feel familiar, like I grew up there. That’s especially true in *Dubliners*, and you really get the same vibe in *Ulysses* too. One thing though: at the beginning I tried to just go with it and I skipped the appendices, which ended up being a mistake. After chapter 1 I was suddenly obsessively looking at every little detail. To be honest, I didn’t fully “get” a lot of it. But I figure that might be normal—like only Joyce himself could really understand it completely. After this I’m grabbing some short stories to clear my brain, then back to my sci-fi favorites. And if everything goes okay, I’ll probably try *Finnegans Wake* sometime next year.

What are the best online Ulysses/James Joyce resources?

By early_cat

I’m trying to find some plot guides and any kind of more niche/esoteric blogs or deeper sources that might actually help make sense of Ulysses and Joyce. If anyone has recommendations, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!

Why is "Ulysses" by James Joyce seen as one of the best books?

By field_simple

So I’m kinda wondering… what’s the point of this book? I’ve heard that almost nobody actually finishes it and that it’s brutal/hard to get through. I bought it a couple months ago but still haven’t started it, so can someone explain why people hype it so much? The whole Ulysses thing confuses me a bit.

[Discussion] Ulysses by James Joyce | Chapter 18

By Superuser

Alright, this is the last Ulysses discussion (!!!) and wow, what a ride. It was honestly so much fun but also pure misery at the same time. I don’t think I could’ve made it through without everyone who was in the discussions—big thanks to u/lazylittlelady, u/le-peep, u/Blackberry_Weary, u/Adventurous_Onion989, and everyone else who joined in. For today we’re talking episode 18, where we finally get Molly’s side of things. The main discussion prompts are in the comments, but please feel free to throw in your own thoughts too. Links: Schedule Marginalia If you need it, there’s also a summary over on SparkNotes.

Struggling with Ulysses (RANT)

By pink_turtle76

I started Ulysses by James Joyce about a week ago, and this is probably my 4th or 5th try at it. Every time before, I got stuck pretty much right away in the Buck Mulligan/Stephen Dedalus opening. Just to maybe not sound like a total hack here, I’ve read other stuff people like to call hard without too much trouble. I got a lot out of Pynchon, Infinite Jest, The Brothers Karamazov, stuff like that. Right now I’m about halfway into Circe, the brothel/play chapter. There are parts I’ve genuinely liked. Like in Cyclops, when Joyce goes on forever about how epic The Citizen is, then flips into this line: So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid. That almost killed me. He does have great jokes, little everyday details, and I get that the stream of consciousness thing influenced a ton of writers after him. Robert Anton Wilson was one of my favorites too, and he leaned on Joyce a lot in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. But I’ve also been trying to figure out why Joyce did all this. That quote where he said he stuffed it with so many puzzles that professors would be arguing over it forever doesn’t exactly make me feel better about it. Most people reading a novel are not trying to win some weird intelligence contest against the author by decoding every little enigma and maze and mystery they can find. And I don’t really see how turning the whole thing into a public brain-off helps much either. Like, I’m on Circe now, but the chapter before it is Oxen of the Sun. From what I read on Wikipedia, that whole chapter tracks the history of English prose from Latin up to around 1904 Irish street slang. Since it’s set in a maternity ward and then a pub, I guess you can read that as the language developing alongside the fetus, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and all that. And the chapter is something like 20,388 words long. Sure, that’s clever. Would I have figured out exactly what Joyce was doing with the language if I hadn’t looked it up? No way. I’d have noticed it changing, but I don’t think I would’ve immediately tied it to the whole history of English, especially since he doesn’t seem to actually use Old or Middle English spellings, at least not that I noticed, just the grammar and word order. So how much of this stuff is supposed to matter? The word count, for example. If you take 20,388 and divide it by 9 months of pregnancy, that’s 2265.333 words a month. Divide that by 30 days, and you get 75.5111 words a day. Divide that by 24 hours and it’s 3.14629. Hey, that’s pretty close to pi. Does that mean anything? Maybe. Definitely maybe. Or maybe the paragraph lengths matter? Do the word counts in each paragraph say something about how long each stretch of English history lasted? Or maybe they match the number of surviving works from that period? I guess what I’m saying is I’m not sure how much of this is actually useful or actually deep. There are lots of cool bits, but has it really changed how I see the human condition or anything like that? Not really, so far. Have I learned something profound? Nope. Have I met any characters who felt real? A few, I guess. But if Joyce suddenly killed one of them off, I don’t think I’d care all that much. I’m just not emotionally attached to anybody in this book, and a lot of that is because of all Joyce’s intellectual trickery. Anyway, I do want to get to Molly’s big ending monologue, but at this point I’m also kind of ready to be done with the whole thing.

What are yall favorite quotes from Ulysses?

By simple-market5111

Mine’s basically, “Love loves to love love.” Not sure why it sticks, but it kinda does.

Paulo Coelho: James Joyce's Ulysses is 'harmful' to literature

By Fern_Basket

If you’re going to tear down one of the most talked-about, highly praised books from the last century, you probably need way more than just calling it a “twit” (and honestly, what is that even supposed to mean?).

Ulysses is a work of genius and deserves to be read

By footnote_cliff1986

Every chapter feels like it’s taking some writing “idea” and just going hard with it—like a long walk through time and all the weird things prose can do. It’s almost like you’re reading one continuous day, but each part is also its own little experiment. And the timing is nuts: it’s pretty much real-time, mostly sitting inside one person’s head. If you’re reading it straight through, each chapter takes about an hour. It’s like the whole book is a normal human day from morning to early dawn—minus the sleep part. It also starts around 8am and runs until the early morning of June 17th. There are 18 episodes that line up with the Odyssey, but the whole setup feels almost like that old-school Catholic Latin mass vibe too. Like the first line is basically “I’m going to the altar,” which is such a specific choice that I still don’t fully get why it works as well as it does. What gets me most is how accurate the dialogue feels. I actually asked some older relatives about old Irish bits of speech that show up, like “Begob,” “By God,” and “Bejaysus,” and they started remembering relatives who’d been gone for ages. It’s this whole vanished culture just walking around on the page—nobody talks like that now. Joyce also doesn’t seem interested in making anything “easier” to get into. It’s all sincere and detailed, like he’s basically saying the everyday annoying little life of some regular dude still counts as art. And yeah, it gets heavy: the suicide in Stephen’s family, him pulling away, then Bloom’s kid passing and everything turning colder between him and his wife. Just all the petty cruelty and awkward little routines of the day. It sounds awful when I put it like that, but somehow the writing makes it feel real and important instead of just depressing. The prose is unreal—like some of the best I’ve ever read. Even that one line about the “Heaventree of stars…” thing. It’s weird and gorgeous. It’s not even just poetic for no reason either, it feels packed with references and it still works out loud. Like it’s got that “night blue” thing going on, and the whole sentence just sticks in your head. The book is full of that kind of stuff. And I love the “big dot” moment in the Ithaca chapter. It just feels like the book is slowly pulling back—like someone gently showing you the whole planet and how tiny you are, then acting like it’s all both meaningless and meaningful at the same time. Which is kind of the point, I guess: we literally spent a whole day inside three heads, and then it ends with Molly and Leopold. Molly’s unfaithful, Leopold is… Leopold, and yeah the book implies some pretty gross stuff about him (lol). But even with all the mess, it still lands on this weird life-affirming note—like that “Yes I said yes…” ending. Two people stuck loving each other right up until they can’t anymore.

Ulysses

By Small-Mug1980

I made a New Year’s resolution to really dig into older/classical novels. Lately I’ve been getting into more Murakami-style stuff, and I like how it’s kinda deep but leaves a lot up to the reader to figure out. I just finished *Crime and Punishment* a couple weeks ago, started *War and Peace* but I’m basically stuck/drop-and-pick-it-up for now (different story), and I’m only like 20 pages from finishing *To Kill a Mockingbird*. I kinda feel like once I get through *War and Peace* I’ll be in the right headspace to tackle *Ulysses*. But when I asked a few friends, the advice was all over the place. A lot of them said they couldn’t get into it because it wasn’t really their genre, and one person even said it felt like it went against their religion. So… should I actually read it? I’m the type that likes doing a lot of research and going into books with my eyes open. If it’s not a good idea for me, should I just drop *Ulysses* and go for *Pride and Prejudice* instead?

Underwhelmed by Ulysses, especially compared to Absalom Absalom! Which I read directly prior

By bronzeFish1980

Hi everyone—I feel like I’m about to get roasted for this. I just read *Ulysses* for the first time, and I used an episode guide site plus ChatGPT for clarifying questions. I did get some laughs and there were definitely parts with nice, fun-to-read writing, but overall I felt like the book was trying really hard to be clever—kind of intellectual, kind of flowery/whimsical in a way that didn’t totally work for me. I’m a psychiatrist, so I’m extra aware of what “consciousness” is supposed to feel like on the page, and I didn’t think it really captured it the way I hoped. To me, it felt more like talking around consciousness than actually getting inside it—more like it was doing a performance of it. And I kept thinking of someone like Charlie Kaufman, who to me feels more true to how thinking actually goes. I also respected the talent, especially in the earlier “big” episodes like *Oxen of the Sun* and *Ithaca*, but the constant stylistic switches and the way it’s structured after *Ulysses* (plus the Hamlet stuff, including Shakespeare showing up in *Circe*) felt a bit gimmicky. For comparison, I read *Absalom, Absalom!* right before *Ulysses*, and I honestly can’t picture choosing *Ulysses* over it. With *Absalom*, the writing kept giving me this creeping, emotional impact—like actual chills—and it even made me tear up at parts. The emotional punch just felt way stronger. With Joyce, again, I felt mostly “cognitive” effort. Has anyone else read both and ended up feeling similarly? Or do you totally disagree? Also I’m a middle-aged American guy, so… I don’t know if that changes my taste at all. Edit: I’m really enjoying the discussion. And yeah, I know people are reacting to the fact that I used ChatGPT. I wasn’t using it to summarize or interpret anything—I mostly used it like a dictionary, to remember minor characters, or check Irish history/politics when I got stuck.

What is Ulysses? Help me understand.

By LilyLovesBooks64

I’ve gotten through about 100 pages of Ulysses and I still have no idea what I’m reading it for. It opens with Stephen Dedalus, then it suddenly shifts to Leopold Bloom. I can tell what the big theme is supposed to be, and that it’s basically Joyce riffing on The Odyssey—but that doesn’t make it any easier. The dialogue stops so abruptly and then it goes into this “thinking” part out of nowhere, like there’s no real connection between the bits. There isn’t much continuity, at least not in a way I can follow. I really want to actually enjoy it, but so far it’s mostly been hard and annoying. How do you all get the right perspective for this book? Also: wow, you people are genuinely really nice.

Ulysses by James Joyce : Prerequisite reading for Ulysses

By heatherkey1989

Hey. I’m not really an English lit person, and I’m not trying to read *Ulysses* just so I can write some big essay about it. I mostly want to read it because so many people say it’s one of the best things they’ve ever read. But when I look around online, it seems like there’s this whole list of stuff I’m “supposed” to read first (like *Dubliners* and all that), and honestly that kind of freaks me out. So, do I actually need to go through all the recommended reading before I can enjoy *Ulysses*? I’ve already read the *Odyssey* (the shortened versions) and the Trojan War stories. Sorry if this has been asked a ton—I just really want to figure it out before I commit.