Why did I love this book? Number one, I finished it!--with a lot of help from an online course offered through the Community of Writers in the High Sierras and led by author Peter Orner. I also listened to an audio version of the novel as I read it, which was tremendously helpful. There are no chapter headings in Ulysses and so many characters. The dialogue is not punctuated as such and is intermingled with the internal thoughts of not always identified narrators. There are Latin phrases. Every line contains some obscure literary, historical, or Irish reference.
Ulysses was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the famous Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. The novel chronicles a day in the life of three characters in Dublin on June 16, 1904. It’s considered by many to be a masterpiece. It’s criticized by some as needing a stricter editor. It’s controversial. There was an obscenity trial about the serialized magazine version of the book in the United States in 1921.
Someone said reading Ulysses is like beating your brain against a wall and when you stop, you think “I kind of liked that.” Ulysses is actually a very funny story, especially when listening to someone else read it out loud. It’s bawdy. There’s a lot of descriptions of bodily fluids. The language is beautiful, specific, and very real, but it also requires a suspension “of our understanding of what constitutes reality,” as pointed out by essayist Abby Flight.
Peter Orner was a very engaging teacher as well, encouraging us to keep ourselves grounded in the story, to keep asking, “where are we?” But his best advice for me was his caution to read Ulysses slowly. “Don’t skim,” he said. “There’s no point in reading it, if you skim.”
I’m a fast reader. I took an Evelyn Wood speed-reading class in high school just before I graduated in 1970. The skimming and scanning techniques I learned in the class helped me get through business courses in college and were instrumental in my success as a government audit manager who edited thousands of audit reports and had to understand countless postal service regulations. These days, I read more than 60 novels a year. I fly through books quickly, so eager to know what is going to happen and how the author created the magic, that I can’t stop turning the pages, knowing I will likely end up reading the entire book again.
With Ulysses, I made myself slow down and be patient with myself as a reader (and to be patient with James Joyce as a writer.) Ulysses is not a “stream of consciousness” novel as most people like to describe it. It’s about everyone’s streams of consciousness running all together. It’s an accurate documentation of the noise of life on one day in Dublin, Ireland. It’s about love between strangers. It’s about how strange and awful and wonderful humans can be.
It’s also about 783 pages long and I was very happy to start reading something else!
James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on one day in June 1904. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature and was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience
N. West Moss finds herself bleeding uncontrollably in the middle of a writing class and drives herself to a hospital. She's eventually diagnosed with uterine hemangioma and a hysterectomy is scheduled.
I had a hysterectomy in my late thirties and Moss's reflections on infertility, motherhood, daughterhood, and leaving a legacy without having children resonated deeply with me. This memoir feels like a chat with the kind of friend I wish I had. Moss's words are full of wisdom and kindness and testify to the joy of recognizing the beauty in the daily world. This isn't a book about a woman desperate to have children. It's about living a full life of your own choosing.
Honest, warm, and witty, this memoir reads like a chat with a dear friend sharing her insight and taking us along as she heals. Complete with family stories over cocktails and a praying mantis named Claude. "I drive and say to myself, if I am dying, if this is how I die, then this is how I die." When N. West Moss finds herself bleeding uncontrollably in the middle of a writing class, she manages to drive herself to the nearest hospital. Doctors are baffled, but eventually a diagnosis-uterine hemangioma-is rendered and a hysterectomy is scheduled. In prose both lyrical…
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree's family runs an alligator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. Her mother is the number one alligator wrestler, but she dies the family is plunged into chaos. Her father leaves, her sister falls in love with a ghost, and her brother defects to a rival theme park. Ava sets out on a mission to save them all.
Ava is a compelling protagonist that I admired and worried about continually. Karen Russell's voice is completely unique and her evocation of place is stunning. As I struggle to write my own Southern family's story, I envy and admire Russell's talents.
New York Times Bestseller | Pulitzer Prize Finalist
"Ms. Russell is one in a million. . . . A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book."--The New York Times
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness.
“Those People Behind Us" is set in the summer of 2017 in the fictional city of Wellington Beach, California, a suburban coastal town increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing prices. These divisions change the lives of five neighbors as they search for home and community in a neighborhood where no one can agree who belongs.
