Hey all, thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this, you might like the follow-up episode of How To Read It in which I take a look at Joseph Heller's Catch-22 which you can find here: ua-cam.com/video/T9jS5ka_fNo/v-deo.html
Hi Tom, really enjoy your channel. Though I tried to read this book twice, I found it so confusing that I couldn't get through it. Can you dumb it down for me in a few words? Thanks.
@@nedgilkeson4391 - try listening to it, it is a brilliant listen. also skip to Bloom and skim over Stephen's chapters, you can always come back to them. for a guide I recommend Declan Kiberd (lecturer in Joyce's old alma mater)
Absolutely love it. Your enthusiasm is infectious, so to add to the Ulysses apologia: What I hate about the conflation of "Ulysses is great" and "Ulysses is hard" is that it makes Joyce sound terribly pretentious, just trying to be clever and obscure, when Ulysses is a deeply sincere and intensely personal work. He spent seven years and sacrificed most of his eyesight writing out the manuscript of an 800 page novel longhand, and survived mostly because of Harriet Shaw Weaver's patronage. It was a colossal undertaking, and he approached it with both the determination of purpose in what he knew he was creating, and the joy of working on something that it's 100% clear that he loved. Specifically, if you are a writer, you owe it to yourself to read Ulysses, both to engage with one of the undisputed masters of language, and to see how much inventive, creative fun he had with all of it.
I think everyone reading Ulysses should listen to the voice of Joyce reading it. I love Ireland. I lived in Dublin for most of the 70’s. There is something so quintessentially Dublin about Joyce. I love it. I must admit, I never got through Finnegan’s Wake, although I enjoyed listening to Joyce reading it.
I just finished reading Ulysses last week--it took almost a year! Throughout the book I learned how to be a better reader. My uncle lent me the book and made sure I had the annotations along with it. But soon I figured out I needed more of an overview of each chapter--not every single word or reference. So I started reading the sparknotes before each chapter and following along that way, which helped tremendously and I would love to check out that book you recommended next time I read Ulysses. Also, my Uncle recommended I should listen to the last episode, which was fantastic as well as it gave so much emotion to the words! Love your video, thanks for posting it!
Hope you enjoyed it! I found the same actually; line by line guides weren't massively helpful but that general overview just helped ground me in what was going on in the plot when I needed it. After spending so much time with my head in Ulysses, however, shorter books all seem a little thematically thin!
I attempted to read this book twice, & though being an English & Literature major, I could make no sense of it whatsoever & couldn't get through it. Can you clue me in with an over view? Thanks.
So lucky... when I started reading it my teacher thought I was insane... TT I’m still reading it and I don’t think I can either... BUT ILL GET THERE EVENTUALLY *insert anime opening*
Hi all, thanks for watching! I hope this video is useful to anyone wanting to have a crack at reading Ulysses and, as I said in the video, any thoughts on the format would be much appreciated!
Finished Ulysses after watching this video. Took me three months, but it has been worth it. Ulysses captures so many aspects of life and the human experience, and how the wealth of complex emotions and circumstances culminate into how we live our lives. This video was super helpful! Thank you! I really understood the book because of this. For those who haven't read it, I'd recommend reading a quick plot summary of each chapter once you finish it, as it helps you make sure that you understood what occurred. It's challenging to read, but it is totally worth it!
Yes, I’ve read JJ’s Ulysses. Yes, it is hard to understand. But leaving ME behind and softly falling into JJ’s magic pages always makes thoughts and senses (some I never knew I had) light up and resonate with raw life. Did I enjoy your “How to Read It” - Yes. More? YES !
This was absolutely wonderful and I’m so grateful you made this! I was an avid reader as a kid reading every day, loving books more than TV and video games, but I’m in my 30s now and have lost the love for it. I bought a copy of Ulysses after heading about it on a podcast but haven’t even opened it, because I was too fearful about feeling stupid or my fried attention span making it painful. Your wonderful video assuaged that fear completely and I’m totally stuck into it now. You are brilliant!
Nicely done. I'm on my 3rd attempt at this book, and this time I'm much further on than I've previously gotten (over halfway now) - I have to say I am enjoying it far more this time than previously and I think its videos like this that have helped. I am appreciating it as a sedate, meandering and experimental look at everyday life in Dublin at that time. I appreciate the wit and levity its often written with. In short I think I'm so much further through and enjoying the read so much more because I'm not taking the novel quite so seriously as I did before.
I'm on my first read through and have finished the third chapter... I barely have the vaguest notion of what I just read lol the first and second chapter were clear enough, but now I feel lost.
God man Mr. Nicholas! This is my second attempt of the book (after 15 years break!) and your video made it bit easier to approach it and more encouraging to keep reading. Best from 2021 Ireland 🇮🇪
Came across this video having decided to give Ulysses a try. Loved it! Your enthusiasm for and down-to-earth approach to the book is really helpful! Thank you!
A remarkable novel appeared lately, titled No Land for Dead Men is a superb work and it has all the features of Ulysses but with a good story in it; a fantastic book.
I most insightful extremely brief encounter with the uproarously funny Ulysses of James Joyce who surely must have been a genius. Total congrats on this!
As someone who took a Joyce class in college to read this book, I gotta say this was a good introduction. Also, it's so weird in retrospect how Ulysses is held up as so hard when Joyce's next book, Finnegan's wake, I found impossible to read.
I read it into a tape recorder for about an hour a day and listened back while I was doing chores . I think it took about six weeks. There was no way I could have taken it in in one reading and even with the playback I probably didn't get half of it , but I enjoyed the writing and it made me realize that my vocabulary needed an upgrade . I kept a notebook of unfamiliar words to look up before I played back. The changes in literary styles in the book showed how different Weltanschauungen can inform a given subject.
I've never read the book. I have a copy and I've thumbed it over the years. Since watching this vid I've started turning pages. My first thought is, not that I should read this book.....but it may benefit me if I do. This vid, narrated expertly and knowledgeably , is an inspiration and the literal journey begins!
Thank you Tom for your invigorating overview of Ulysses- why I should have a crack at it. Many years ago I attempted ‘Finnigans Wake’, I got through 278 pages by reading it aloud to myself in my best Irish accent (I’m Australian with no Irish experience) which helped to made the experience an existential joy especially - when reading it to my lover, ( perhaps more like a farce) however the virtual impenetrability of the txt & especially its narrative, has left me procrastinating on Ulysses ( I have read Homer’s original) but your introduction has reactivated my interest in the heroic undertaking. Tom - your finely articulated enthusiasm is nothing short of infectious - all power to your adventures. Thank you. 🙏🎖👑
Gary. You absolutely must finish Finnegan's Wake and then read it again a year or two later, and then again a year or two after that. I know it sounds crazy but it's not. I have read the book at least a half dozen times and only the last time did I read it out loud. The first time I read it took a year. I could only read a couple of pages at night because I spent so much time rereading, trying to understand better or trying to misunderstand less. Anyway, with each read my reading time lessened but only slightly, still taking months. However, when I read it aloud, I finished cover to cover in a couple of weeks. I, too, read it in one of the worst Irish accents ever attempted buy a Floridian and laughed out loud more times than I had in all the previous readings. After reading FW a few times, I realized that my understanding of the text increased because my knowledge about many things mentioned in the book had increased. It is said that Joyce used more than 70 languages, in addition to his seemingly nonstop polyglot puns and portmanteau words, which means that if you learned a new language you would probably understand the book better. The same thing happens if you learn new words or old words that have gone out of usage. If I was a Catholic I would know more but I'm just a southern baptist so I don't understand all the references Joyce makes about Catholicism. I know almost no Latin but if I knew more the book would make more sense. What I'm saying is that your understanding of the novel increases with your life experiences. It's been probably a decade now since I last read it. So when I do finally read it again it will undoubtedly make more sense. So please do yourself a favor and read the rest of the novel, aloud, of course. Lastly, I recommend you buying a small book written by Joseph Campbell and someone else called A Skeleton Key To Finnegan's Wake. It's a great guide. Good Luck and Happy Reading
Having read Portrait is a really good set-up for reading Ulysses. Partly because it means that you've got that little bit of background on Steven but largely because Portrait just acclimatises you to Joyce's style that little bit (and gets you used to occasionally having to wade through something not entirely engaging, ahemthesermonahem.
Well done,Tom, I tried many times, also testing people pretending to have read, while they obviously could just quote the first lines of chapter one, then I stopped even trying… YOU,Tom, make me want to start anew, thank you‼️
Haha, thought I'd start with a tough one (in that, I basically had to leave out 90% of what I wanted to say about it!) so that everything else should then seem easy by comparison, right?
Tom Nicholas I thought you did a good job. It might have helped enrich the context by mentioning the characteristic of modernism in literature. I’m a high school English lit teacher, and I must say your enthusiasm and engagement with the material is inspirational.
@@jamesroberts2282 Thanks James! Yes, I was keen to squeeze that in but didn't want to make it too long! I do have a video on Modernism more generally although it's not particularly focussed on literature. Thanks you, I do try to get some of that enthusiasm across in my videos so I'm glad that's working!
@@Tom_Nicholas You can always say the other 90% in another piece or even break it up into segments . I'm positive anybody that watches it will thoroughly enjoy and appreciate it .
A good rapport and the way of engagement with the topic. I still have butterflies before embarking on the book. Wish they would spare me and lead me nicely through the book. Thanks
Hey all, thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this, you might like the follow-up episode of How To Read It in which I take a look at Joseph Heller's Catch-22 which you can find here: ua-cam.com/video/T9jS5ka_fNo/v-deo.html
Hi all! Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video and it maybe inspired you to have a crack at Ulysses! If you'd like to support me to make more videos like this, and to help influence exactly what I make next, then I've just launched a Patreon. I'd love it if you'd pop over and check it out and, if you're able, consider supporting my channel! Check it out here: www.patreon.com/tomnicholas
This is awesome, you really should do something similar for Mad Men. This video made me realise how much it references James Joyce in style and content. James Joyce inspired Lacan, Lacan inspired Mad Men
Excellent eloquent really interesting presentation thought provoking and presented in a friendly self effacing way. Thanks very much. Encouraged me to persevere with the book. Well done. James
Excellent summary Tom. Although JJ did make that comment about keeping academics busy analyzing this work, at its core, Joyce’s writing is about finding signicance in the mundane. Cheers.
Hey man, you convinced me to read Ulysses, simply in the sense that you said it wasn't important to know exactly what's happening ALL the time... I actually didn't really understand anything until chapter 4 (let alone know I was past ch. 1 because the "episodes" aren't numbered in my edition). By the time I made it this far, I more or less understand Joyce's style insofar as I could start picking up on story structure, and once that happens, the words become surreal/psychic/psychedelic images in my minds-pace. Favorite fiction book 100%. TY
That's awesome Thomas! Yeah, that was a really important thing for me to get past too. I think it can be tempting to think "AHH, I'M LOST, IT'S ALL POINTLESS, I SHOULD GIVE UP" a lot during this book but I found that, as long as you stick with it, it's not like everything moves too quickly so you do eventually get back on track again. There's a couple of guides to where the "episodes" start and end online which I think it's worth seeking out as it does help to know when you've finished one and started another. Glad you're enjoying it!
Finnegans Wake is his biggest masterpiece but definitely the most difficult because the entire book is a giant pun, made up of smaller puns. The puns are sometimes referencing multiple languages at once too. Paradoxically, as arcane as FW is, it actually has basically a coherent story. It is structured like a fractal though.
Trippy? Naked Lunch is “trippy” Finnegan’s Wake is literally impossible to read. It’s cool to pick up and read a page every now and then just for the pure stream of consciousness like poetry but it’s hardly coherent.
Cool that you enjoyed it. I needed the Gifford annotations along with the audiobook to get thru it. The book is frustrating beyond words, and took it in college for a semester
Ulysses in 15 minutes, Joyce himself said one particular sentence in the book took several days to compose. Nice summary though, people will be more prepared, thanks to you, than I was the first time around!
This book is certainly a challenge, and definitely not one you would read to wind-down with on a lazy Sunday afternoon. You really need to mentally prepare for. But most importantly, don’t be shy to read in very short stints. It took me almost 2 years to finish it.
Just finishing the book. As Czech I had to read it in English with the help of Czech translation. Completely in love with the book. It is so witty, funny, dirty (and sometimes braindamaging in a good way). I know I will return and read it again and again...
I'm about halfway through Ulysses and have been using the Sparknotes, but I think I would like to get the guide you mentioned also. I've read Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Stephen Hero, but am haunted by how much I'm missing as I read through. Yes I will have finished the book after I'm at the last page, but it is frustrating to know that I'm missing a lot. I really liked how you cut in scenes from historical Dublin as well as scenes from the movie (I didn't realize there even was a movie). I was picturing Bloom and Molly much differently than they looked in the movie scenes. :) Anyway, I love classics and will be delving into your channel more now that I found it. I find most Booktubers are not into classics and that's where I need the most help when I'm reading, LOL!
Dublin was a great place to grow up in the 60's and even the 70's. Characters abounded in every pub and hotel bar. Even the pubs had incredible character. People cared for each other. People were really interesting! Then tourism and demolition took over and destroyed it all. Homogenous. Joyce captures all of the interesting phase of Dublin's evolution (and subsequent demise) so beautifully and accurately. Long live Joyce! ☘💚
I think it helps if we approach this book knowing that the " density" of it comes very much from its style. One has to get used to how Joyce develops his stream of consciousness. In my case, when I got to chapter 3 I did not get most of it and then I read it again and it made much more sense. It is very important to know what to expect before reading it. That's when your vid comes at hand. Thanks for the amazing content you upload
I have finished your WTF format and now starting this one, I love it too! I suggest you change the name to OMG, cross the G and call it "Oh my Reading"! I hope you are going to make a video about Proust someday, but Celine, Artaud or Blanchot would also be pretty need
Hi Aditi! Definitely planning on it! I got a bit sidelined reading Infinite Jest but am planning on making a Pride and Prejudice next followed most probably by A Tale of Two Cities. Although I have been debating making a Catch 22 one to tie in with the current TV adaptation. Any suggestions as to what books you'd like me to cover though I'd really appreciate!!
I didn’t realize Ulysses was literally just the Roman name for Odysseus until I read the odyssey and saw that for the Roman translations. I listened to a Greek one though as it felt more fitting. I was thinking about reading Ulysses since I just finished the odyssey but I’ll probably give it some time and read Joyce’s other novels first.
I am a new reader where should I begin , I am cutrently reading the brothers karamazovs. I don't know where to go next and in what order(like which classics should I read before moving on to more complex one's) .
There isn't a particular order to read these books and I recommend you follow with whatever suits your fancy. If The Brothers Karamazovs impressed you, you may enjoy as well Dostoevsky's other work or other "realism" authors such as Balzac, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Galdós, the list goes on. Jack London has sparked my interest as of late, Martin Eden, The Call of the Wild are great and reading them in their original form wasn't too complicated (English isn't my native language).
Great stuff, sir. I love that book, but some bits are so dense you have to skip 'em and rejoin the rollercoaster 5 pages on. I really liked where Dedalus closes his eyes on the beach to imagine what it would be like to be blind. Finnegan's Wake totally threw me tho'; I had to give up 28 pages in
I’ve just finished chapter 4 , I’m using a grade saver website to explain each chapter after I’ve read it its heavy going but it’s lockdown so nothing better to do !
Despite its occasional use in spoken monologue, the Very Long Literary Sentence properly exists in the mind (hence “stream-of-consciousness”), since the most wordy of literary exhalations would exhaust the lungs’ capacity. Molly Bloom’s 36-page, two-sentence run-on soliloquy at the close of Joyce’s Ulysses takes place entirely in her thoughts. Faulkner’s longest sentence-smack in the middle of Absalom, Absalom! -unspools in Quentin Compson’s tortured, silent ruminations. According to a 1983 Guinness Book of Records, this monster once qualified as literature’s longest at 1,288 words, but that record has long been surpassed, in English at least, by Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, which ends with a 33-page-long, 13,955 word sentence. Czech and Polish novelists have written book-length sentences since the sixties, and French writer Mathias Énard puts them all to shame with a one-sentence novel 517 pages long, though its status is “compromised by 23 chapter breaks that alleviate eye strain,” writes Ed Park in the New York Times. Like Faulkner’s glorious run-ons, Jacob Silverman describes Énard’s one-sentence Zone as transmuting “the horrific into something sublime.” Are these literary stunts kin to Philippe Petit’s highwire challenges-undertaken for the thrill and just to show they can be done? Park sees the “The Very Long Sentence” in more philosophical terms, as “a futile hedge against separation, an unwillingness to part from loved ones, the world, life itself.” Perhaps this is why the very long sentence seems most expressive of life at its fullest and most expansive. Below, we bring you five long literary sentences culled from various sources on the subject. These are, of course, not the “5 longest,” nor the “5 best,” nor any other superlative. They are simply five fine examples of The Very Long Sentence in literature. Enjoy reading and re-reading them, and please leave your favorite Very Long Sentence in the comments. At The New Yorker‘s “Book Club,” Jon Michaud points us toward this long sentence, from Samuel Beckett’s Watt. We find the title character, “an obsessively rational servant,” attempting to “see a pattern in how his master, Mr. Knott, rearranges the furniture.” Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washand-stand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its back by the bed, and the dressing table on its face by the door, and the night-stool on its back by the window and the washand-stand on its feet by the fire; and on the Tuesday… Here, writes Michaud, the long sentence conveys “a desperate attempt to nail down all the possibilities in a given situation, to keep the world under control by enumerating it.” The next example, from Poynter, achieves a very different effect. Instead of listing concrete objects, the sentence below from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby opens up into a series of abstract phrases. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. Chosen by The American Scholar editors as one of the “ten best sentences,” the passage, writes Roy Peter Clark, achieves quite a feat: “Long sentences don’t usually hold together under the weight of abstractions, but this one sets a clear path to the most important phrase, planted firmly at the end, ‘his capacity for wonder.’” Jane Wong at Tin House’s blog “The Open Bar” quotes the hypnotic sentence below from Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Letter from Home.” I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, I baked the bread, I brewed the tea, I washed the clothes, I dressed the children; the cat meowed, the dog barked, the horse neighed, the mouse squeaked, the fly buzzed, the goldfish living in a bowl stretched its jaws; the door banged shut, the stairs creaked, the fridge hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot boiled, the gas hissed through the stove, the tree branches heavy with snow crashed against the roof; my heart beat loudly thud! thud!, tiny beads of water grew folds, I shed my skin… Kincaid’s sentences, Wong writes, “have the ability to simultaneously suspend and propel the reader. We trust her semi-colons and follow until we are surprised to find the period. We stand on that rock of a period-with water all around us, and ask: how did we get here?” The blog Paperback Writer brings us the “puzzle” below from notorious long-sentence-writer Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the water of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the Mouth -- rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Blogger Rebecca quotes Woolf as a challenge to her readers to become better writers. “This sentence is not something to be feared,” she writes, “it is something to be embraced.” Finally, from The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, we have the very Molly Bloom-like sentence below from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run: But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry had been talking about marriage for a while and anyway laughed when she told him in early February about missing her period and said Great she was terribly frightened and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there was so much nice in him she couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he made her be proud) they were married after her missing her second period in March and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the feeling of being alone would melt a little with a little drink. Sentences like these, writes Barnes & Noble blogger Hanna McGrath, “demand something from the reader: patience.” That may be so, but they reward that patience with delight for those who love language too rich for the pinched limitations of workaday grammar and syntax.
Hey all, thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this, you might like the follow-up episode of How To Read It in which I take a look at Joseph Heller's Catch-22 which you can find here: ua-cam.com/video/T9jS5ka_fNo/v-deo.html
Hi Tom, really enjoy your channel. Though I tried to read this book twice, I found it so confusing that I couldn't get through it. Can you dumb it down for me in a few words? Thanks.
@@nedgilkeson4391 - try listening to it, it is a brilliant listen. also skip to Bloom and skim over Stephen's chapters, you can always come back to them. for a guide I recommend Declan Kiberd (lecturer in Joyce's old alma mater)
Absolutely love it. Your enthusiasm is infectious, so to add to the Ulysses apologia: What I hate about the conflation of "Ulysses is great" and "Ulysses is hard" is that it makes Joyce sound terribly pretentious, just trying to be clever and obscure, when Ulysses is a deeply sincere and intensely personal work. He spent seven years and sacrificed most of his eyesight writing out the manuscript of an 800 page novel longhand, and survived mostly because of Harriet Shaw Weaver's patronage. It was a colossal undertaking, and he approached it with both the determination of purpose in what he knew he was creating, and the joy of working on something that it's 100% clear that he loved.
Specifically, if you are a writer, you owe it to yourself to read Ulysses, both to engage with one of the undisputed masters of language, and to see how much inventive, creative fun he had with all of it.
I think everyone reading Ulysses should listen to the voice of Joyce reading it. I love Ireland. I lived in Dublin for most of the 70’s. There is something so quintessentially Dublin about Joyce. I love it. I must admit, I never got through Finnegan’s Wake, although I enjoyed listening to Joyce reading it.
I just finished reading Ulysses last week--it took almost a year! Throughout the book I learned how to be a better reader. My uncle lent me the book and made sure I had the annotations along with it. But soon I figured out I needed more of an overview of each chapter--not every single word or reference. So I started reading the sparknotes before each chapter and following along that way, which helped tremendously and I would love to check out that book you recommended next time I read Ulysses. Also, my Uncle recommended I should listen to the last episode, which was fantastic as well as it gave so much emotion to the words! Love your video, thanks for posting it!
Hope you enjoyed it! I found the same actually; line by line guides weren't massively helpful but that general overview just helped ground me in what was going on in the plot when I needed it. After spending so much time with my head in Ulysses, however, shorter books all seem a little thematically thin!
I attempted to read this book twice, & though being an English & Literature major, I could make no sense of it whatsoever & couldn't get through it. Can you clue me in with an over view? Thanks.
It only took me 2 months wtf
So lucky... when I started reading it my teacher thought I was insane... TT I’m still reading it and I don’t think I can either... BUT ILL GET THERE EVENTUALLY *insert anime opening*
I read Ulysses when I was at grad school in Dublin at UCD. It took me most of a year. It was worth it.
This video reminds me of why youtube is better than TV
Thank you very much for saying so!
This entire channel is why youtube is better than TV!
That's a pretty low bar
Thanks Tom. I'm ten pages in and enjoying the utter freshness of this language, even in 2023.
Hi all, thanks for watching! I hope this video is useful to anyone wanting to have a crack at reading Ulysses and, as I said in the video, any thoughts on the format would be much appreciated!
Finished Ulysses after watching this video. Took me three months, but it has been worth it. Ulysses captures so many aspects of life and the human experience, and how the wealth of complex emotions and circumstances culminate into how we live our lives. This video was super helpful! Thank you! I really understood the book because of this. For those who haven't read it, I'd recommend reading a quick plot summary of each chapter once you finish it, as it helps you make sure that you understood what occurred. It's challenging to read, but it is totally worth it!
Yes, I’ve read JJ’s Ulysses. Yes, it is hard to understand. But leaving ME behind and softly falling into JJ’s magic pages always makes thoughts and senses (some I never knew I had) light up and resonate with raw life. Did I enjoy your “How to Read It” - Yes. More? YES !
Just ordered it today, can't wait to start it whilst in quarantine in Dublin lol. Nice history lesson on the book and man himself.
Did you?
I was literally very skeptical about reading Ulysses, but this video made me really convinced that it can be rewarding. Thank you so much !
Did you read it? If so, how was it?
I recommend audiobook first and then read. Joyce always meant his books to be read aloud.
This was absolutely wonderful and I’m so grateful you made this! I was an avid reader as a kid reading every day, loving books more than TV and video games, but I’m in my 30s now and have lost the love for it. I bought a copy of Ulysses after heading about it on a podcast but haven’t even opened it, because I was too fearful about feeling stupid or my fried attention span making it painful. Your wonderful video assuaged that fear completely and I’m totally stuck into it now. You are brilliant!
Excellent! I have always avoided this book and you are the first person who actually made me want to give it a try!
Nicely done.
I'm on my 3rd attempt at this book, and this time I'm much further on than I've previously gotten (over halfway now) - I have to say I am enjoying it far more this time than previously and I think its videos like this that have helped.
I am appreciating it as a sedate, meandering and experimental look at everyday life in Dublin at that time. I appreciate the wit and levity its often written with. In short I think I'm so much further through and enjoying the read so much more because I'm not taking the novel quite so seriously as I did before.
I'm on my first read through and have finished the third chapter... I barely have the vaguest notion of what I just read lol the first and second chapter were clear enough, but now I feel lost.
This was my introduction to Tom Nicholas, what a charming and intelligent guy. Subsribed!
I loved your way of explaining this great book....Hats off to you....
God man Mr. Nicholas!
This is my second attempt of the book (after 15 years break!) and your video made it bit easier to approach it and more encouraging to keep reading.
Best from 2021 Ireland 🇮🇪
Came across this video having decided to give Ulysses a try. Loved it! Your enthusiasm for and down-to-earth approach to the book is really helpful! Thank you!
Now I think I'm ready to read Ulysses, thank you! Cheers from Brazil 🇧🇷
A remarkable novel appeared lately, titled No Land for Dead Men is a superb work and it has all the features of Ulysses but with a good story in it; a fantastic book.
I most insightful extremely brief encounter with the uproarously funny Ulysses of James Joyce who surely must have been a genius. Total congrats on this!
the advice/context you gave here was more than enough to make reading Ulysses a very fun and immersive experience for me
As someone who took a Joyce class in college to read this book, I gotta say this was a good introduction. Also, it's so weird in retrospect how Ulysses is held up as so hard when Joyce's next book, Finnegan's wake, I found impossible to read.
I read it into a tape recorder for about an hour a day and listened back while I was doing chores . I think it took about six weeks. There was no way I could have taken it in in one reading and even with the playback I probably didn't get half of it , but I enjoyed the writing and it made me realize that my vocabulary needed an upgrade . I kept a notebook of unfamiliar words to look up before I played back. The changes in literary styles in the book showed how different Weltanschauungen can inform a given subject.
It's defiantly a challenging book and one that you could spend a lifetime reading and re-reading to get a deeper understanding of!
I've never read the book. I have a copy and I've thumbed it over the years. Since watching this vid I've started turning pages. My first thought is, not that I should read this book.....but it may benefit me if I do. This vid, narrated expertly and knowledgeably , is an inspiration and the literal journey begins!
Wonderful entry point. Thank you.
Thank you Tom for your invigorating overview of Ulysses- why I should have a crack at it.
Many years ago I attempted ‘Finnigans Wake’, I got through 278 pages by reading it aloud to myself in my best Irish accent (I’m Australian with no Irish experience) which helped to made the experience an existential joy especially - when reading it to my lover, ( perhaps more like a farce) however the virtual impenetrability of the txt & especially its narrative, has left me procrastinating on Ulysses ( I have read Homer’s original) but your introduction has reactivated my interest in the heroic undertaking.
Tom - your finely articulated enthusiasm is nothing short of infectious - all power to your adventures. Thank you. 🙏🎖👑
Gary. You absolutely must finish Finnegan's Wake and then read it again a year or two later, and then again a year or two after that. I know it sounds crazy but it's not. I have read the book at least a half dozen times and only the last time did I read it out loud. The first time I read it took a year. I could only read a couple of pages at night because I spent so much time rereading, trying to understand better or trying to misunderstand less. Anyway, with each read my reading time lessened but only slightly, still taking months. However, when I read it aloud, I finished cover to cover in a couple of weeks. I, too, read it in one of the worst Irish accents ever attempted buy a Floridian and laughed out loud more times than I had in all the previous readings. After reading FW a few times, I realized that my understanding of the text increased because my knowledge about many things mentioned in the book had increased. It is said that Joyce used more than 70 languages, in addition to his seemingly nonstop polyglot puns and portmanteau words, which means that if you learned a new language you would probably understand the book better. The same thing happens if you learn new words or old words that have gone out of usage. If I was a Catholic I would know more but I'm just a southern baptist so I don't understand all the references Joyce makes about Catholicism. I know almost no Latin but if I knew more the book would make more sense. What I'm saying is that your understanding of the novel increases with your life experiences. It's been probably a decade now since I last read it. So when I do finally read it again it will undoubtedly make more sense. So please do yourself a favor and read the rest of the novel, aloud, of course. Lastly, I recommend you buying a small book written by Joseph Campbell and someone else called A Skeleton Key To Finnegan's Wake. It's a great guide. Good Luck and Happy Reading
wow thank you so much Tom. I've just finished reading Portrait and want to start Ulysses. this was really interesting!
Having read Portrait is a really good set-up for reading Ulysses. Partly because it means that you've got that little bit of background on Steven but largely because Portrait just acclimatises you to Joyce's style that little bit (and gets you used to occasionally having to wade through something not entirely engaging, ahemthesermonahem.
@@Tom_Nicholas haha true
I stated enjoying Ulysses when I gave up trying to understand every sentence and just calmly take in the colorful language, images, and thoughts.
Well done,Tom, I tried many times, also testing people pretending to have read, while they obviously could just quote the first lines of chapter one, then I stopped even trying… YOU,Tom, make me want to start anew, thank you‼️
Just came across your channel as I'm gonna start reading Ulysses. Great stuff you've got a new subscriber 😁
Our english teacher wants us to analyze your video rn :)
Thanks from Italy
Tom Nicholas, you are an incredibly likeable and engaging person! Fantastic video - thank you!
I really learned something about literature that I didn't have to figure out for myself - and that's rare.
I'm a mexican trying to read this book. This vídeo is si helpful. Gracias !!
Ulysses as your first crack, ambitious.
It was fundamental in sharping the modernist era of literature.
Haha, thought I'd start with a tough one (in that, I basically had to leave out 90% of what I wanted to say about it!) so that everything else should then seem easy by comparison, right?
Tom Nicholas I thought you did a good job. It might have helped enrich the context by mentioning the characteristic of modernism in literature.
I’m a high school English lit teacher, and I must say your enthusiasm and engagement with the material is inspirational.
@@jamesroberts2282 Thanks James! Yes, I was keen to squeeze that in but didn't want to make it too long! I do have a video on Modernism more generally although it's not particularly focussed on literature.
Thanks you, I do try to get some of that enthusiasm across in my videos so I'm glad that's working!
@@Tom_Nicholas You can always say the other 90% in another piece or even break it up into segments . I'm positive anybody that watches it will thoroughly enjoy and appreciate it .
A good rapport and the way of engagement with the topic. I still have butterflies before embarking on the book. Wish they would spare me and lead me nicely through the book. Thanks
Hey all, thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this, you might like the follow-up episode of How To Read It in which I take a look at Joseph Heller's Catch-22 which you can find here: ua-cam.com/video/T9jS5ka_fNo/v-deo.html
Hi all! Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video and it maybe inspired you to have a crack at Ulysses! If you'd like to support me to make more videos like this, and to help influence exactly what I make next, then I've just launched a Patreon. I'd love it if you'd pop over and check it out and, if you're able, consider supporting my channel! Check it out here: www.patreon.com/tomnicholas
This is awesome, you really should do something similar for Mad Men. This video made me realise how much it references James Joyce in style and content. James Joyce inspired Lacan, Lacan inspired Mad Men
Excellent eloquent really interesting presentation thought provoking and presented in a friendly self effacing way. Thanks very much. Encouraged me to persevere with the book. Well done. James
It would be super cool if you did a deep dive into this book in the style of your newer videos. Still an excellent job, thank you.
Bravo. 👏 this was so well done. Now I am putting Ulysses in my TBR pile. Thank you
I’m on chapter 2 and was completely lost, thanks for this
Excellent summary Tom. Although JJ did make that comment about keeping academics busy analyzing this work, at its core, Joyce’s writing is about finding signicance in the mundane. Cheers.
Hey man, you convinced me to read Ulysses, simply in the sense that you said it wasn't important to know exactly what's happening ALL the time... I actually didn't really understand anything until chapter 4 (let alone know I was past ch. 1 because the "episodes" aren't numbered in my edition). By the time I made it this far, I more or less understand Joyce's style insofar as I could start picking up on story structure, and once that happens, the words become surreal/psychic/psychedelic images in my minds-pace. Favorite fiction book 100%. TY
That's awesome Thomas! Yeah, that was a really important thing for me to get past too. I think it can be tempting to think "AHH, I'M LOST, IT'S ALL POINTLESS, I SHOULD GIVE UP" a lot during this book but I found that, as long as you stick with it, it's not like everything moves too quickly so you do eventually get back on track again.
There's a couple of guides to where the "episodes" start and end online which I think it's worth seeking out as it does help to know when you've finished one and started another.
Glad you're enjoying it!
This video was fantastic. Because of it, I finally feel I have both the the will and a very vested interest in reading Ulysses. Thanks, Tom!
Really helpful. Meticulously collated. Thank you!
Excellent (and motivational!) breakdown Tom! Many thanks ☘
Wow, what an amazing video dude. Thanks for this!
Very useful and fun introduction, thank you!
excellent analysis/review/pre/whatever... - you've motivated me two read it read it!
You could easily be my favorite TA if I was majoring in literature
Haha, that's very kind of you to say!
What wonderful enthusiasm really enjoyed the piece
I'm glad I found this channel. Nice channel mate!
I'm glad you found it too! Cheers Ralph!
Wonderful presentation. I loook forward to more, tom.
Very helpful. Perhaps I will read it again.
Tom, you should have a crack at Finnegans Wake. It's even trippier :P
@@rhythmsteve that would certainly explain it. i got to 40 pages.
Finnegans Wake is his biggest masterpiece but definitely the most difficult because the entire book is a giant pun, made up of smaller puns.
The puns are sometimes referencing multiple languages at once too.
Paradoxically, as arcane as FW is, it actually has basically a coherent story. It is structured like a fractal though.
@@oceanmachine1906 Aggghhh. And every the references (in general) become slightly more obscure...
Trippy? Naked Lunch is “trippy” Finnegan’s Wake is literally impossible to read. It’s cool to pick up and read a page every now and then just for the pure stream of consciousness like poetry but it’s hardly coherent.
@@BigDaddyZakk420 Since when do things have to be coherent to be trippy?
Cool that you enjoyed it. I needed the Gifford annotations along with the audiobook to get thru it. The book is frustrating beyond words, and took it in college for a semester
Ulysses in 15 minutes, Joyce himself said one particular sentence in the book took several days to compose. Nice summary though, people will be more prepared, thanks to you, than I was the first time around!
This book is certainly a challenge, and definitely not one you would read to wind-down with on a lazy Sunday afternoon. You really need to mentally prepare for. But most importantly, don’t be shy to read in very short stints. It took me almost 2 years to finish it.
Just finishing the book. As Czech I had to read it in English with the help of Czech translation. Completely in love with the book. It is so witty, funny, dirty (and sometimes braindamaging in a good way). I know I will return and read it again and again...
I'm about halfway through Ulysses and have been using the Sparknotes, but I think I would like to get the guide you mentioned also. I've read Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Stephen Hero, but am haunted by how much I'm missing as I read through. Yes I will have finished the book after I'm at the last page, but it is frustrating to know that I'm missing a lot. I really liked how you cut in scenes from historical Dublin as well as scenes from the movie (I didn't realize there even was a movie). I was picturing Bloom and Molly much differently than they looked in the movie scenes. :) Anyway, I love classics and will be delving into your channel more now that I found it. I find most Booktubers are not into classics and that's where I need the most help when I'm reading, LOL!
this has been on my tbr list for a while.
Really lovely introduction, both to Ulysses and the potential How to Read in series! I especially appreciated the companion recommendation :)
thanks man for your great and concise analysis, of this master piece!
Dublin was a great place to grow up in the 60's and even the 70's. Characters abounded in every pub and hotel bar. Even the pubs had incredible character. People cared for each other. People were really interesting! Then tourism and demolition took over and destroyed it all. Homogenous. Joyce captures all of the interesting phase of Dublin's evolution (and subsequent demise) so beautifully and accurately. Long live Joyce! ☘💚
I've been addicted to Joyce ever since I heard the penultimate chapter being read on the radio. "Dad, what is this?"
Thank you so much, Tom, I subbed and I love your content thus far.
This man is brilliant
I like the way you speak. you would make a great teacher!
I think it helps if we approach this book knowing that the " density" of it comes very much from its style. One has to get used to how Joyce develops his stream of consciousness. In my case, when I got to chapter 3 I did not get most of it and then I read it again and it made much more sense. It is very important to know what to expect before reading it. That's when your vid comes at hand. Thanks for the amazing content you upload
This video was very helpful and interesting, thank you!!
Very good work sir. Thank you very much
My copy of an annotated Ulysses should arrive to day ... your fellow UA-camr Bookchemist picked up my interest.
I have finished your WTF format and now starting this one, I love it too! I suggest you change the name to OMG, cross the G and call it "Oh my Reading"! I hope you are going to make a video about Proust someday, but Celine, Artaud or Blanchot would also be pretty need
This has been my favorite book since i was 16
Please continue with these videos.
Hi Aditi! Definitely planning on it! I got a bit sidelined reading Infinite Jest but am planning on making a Pride and Prejudice next followed most probably by A Tale of Two Cities. Although I have been debating making a Catch 22 one to tie in with the current TV adaptation. Any suggestions as to what books you'd like me to cover though I'd really appreciate!!
I didn’t realize Ulysses was literally just the Roman name for Odysseus until I read the odyssey and saw that for the Roman translations. I listened to a Greek one though as it felt more fitting. I was thinking about reading Ulysses since I just finished the odyssey but I’ll probably give it some time and read Joyce’s other novels first.
Great video, very helpful, thanks!
I am a new reader where should I begin , I am cutrently reading the brothers karamazovs.
I don't know where to go next and in what order(like which classics should I read before moving on to more complex one's) .
There isn't a particular order to read these books and I recommend you follow with whatever suits your fancy. If The Brothers Karamazovs impressed you, you may enjoy as well Dostoevsky's other work or other "realism" authors such as Balzac, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Galdós, the list goes on. Jack London has sparked my interest as of late, Martin Eden, The Call of the Wild are great and reading them in their original form wasn't too complicated (English isn't my native language).
@@gastaprasta9596 thank you very much
Unabridged The Count of Monte Cristo
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
Try - 'The Man With the Golden Arm' by Nelson Algren.
if you liked the karamazovs, try goethes faust I - thats excactly how I started reading
Thanks for the video !
Good stuff, my dude.
Cheers James, appreciate you saying so!
Your video was much more enjoyable than the book I remember reading. Lol
Excellent introduction to Ulysses
You should read Finnegans Wake, it's even more Joycey!
Still too daunting to try but this has me leaning in the right direction. G'man!
Now you made me less scared in trying to read it!!!!
You are amazing. Kudos for your excellent videos.
As a Dubliner myself, I will say that having Joyce become this highly analysed by posh Oxbridge educators is extremely funny
Yep - even here in Dublin it tends to be the wealthier South - side set that immerses themselves in the book.
I'm still proud of it and Joyce though.
Thank you! I feel ready to start
Oxen of the Sun is a brutal episode to get through, love it though.
You're right there!
Great stuff, sir. I love that book, but some bits are so dense you have to skip 'em and rejoin the rollercoaster 5 pages on. I really liked where Dedalus closes his eyes on the beach to imagine what it would be like to be blind. Finnegan's Wake totally threw me tho'; I had to give up 28 pages in
Thank you for sharing
The Bloomsday event, does that mean that many people in Dublin celebrate the Bloom character as a hero? Do they wear Bloom buttons on their clothes?
loved listening to you! You surely get my subscription for more good videos! 🙏
Please do a video on Finnegan's Wake.
I’ve just finished chapter 4 , I’m using a grade saver website to explain each chapter after I’ve read it its heavy going but it’s lockdown so nothing better to do !
I always started reading with a tumbler of Bushmills. It took me one year and a liver to finish.
Despite its occasional use in spoken monologue, the Very Long Literary Sentence properly exists in the mind (hence “stream-of-consciousness”), since the most wordy of literary exhalations would exhaust the lungs’ capacity. Molly Bloom’s 36-page, two-sentence run-on soliloquy at the close of Joyce’s Ulysses takes place entirely in her thoughts. Faulkner’s longest sentence-smack in the middle of Absalom, Absalom! -unspools in Quentin Compson’s tortured, silent ruminations. According to a 1983 Guinness Book of Records, this monster once qualified as literature’s longest at 1,288 words, but that record has long been surpassed, in English at least, by Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, which ends with a 33-page-long, 13,955 word sentence. Czech and Polish novelists have written book-length sentences since the sixties, and French writer Mathias Énard puts them all to shame with a one-sentence novel 517 pages long, though its status is “compromised by 23 chapter breaks that alleviate eye strain,” writes Ed Park in the New York Times. Like Faulkner’s glorious run-ons, Jacob Silverman describes Énard’s one-sentence Zone as transmuting “the horrific into something sublime.”
Are these literary stunts kin to Philippe Petit’s highwire challenges-undertaken for the thrill and just to show they can be done? Park sees the “The Very Long Sentence” in more philosophical terms, as “a futile hedge against separation, an unwillingness to part from loved ones, the world, life itself.” Perhaps this is why the very long sentence seems most expressive of life at its fullest and most expansive. Below, we bring you five long literary sentences culled from various sources on the subject. These are, of course, not the “5 longest,” nor the “5 best,” nor any other superlative. They are simply five fine examples of The Very Long Sentence in literature. Enjoy reading and re-reading them, and please leave your favorite Very Long Sentence in the comments.
At The New Yorker‘s “Book Club,” Jon Michaud points us toward this long sentence, from Samuel Beckett’s Watt. We find the title character, “an obsessively rational servant,” attempting to “see a pattern in how his master, Mr. Knott, rearranges the furniture.”
Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washand-stand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its back by the bed, and the dressing table on its face by the door, and the night-stool on its back by the window and the washand-stand on its feet by the fire; and on the Tuesday…
Here, writes Michaud, the long sentence conveys “a desperate attempt to nail down all the possibilities in a given situation, to keep the world under control by enumerating it.”
The next example, from Poynter, achieves a very different effect. Instead of listing concrete objects, the sentence below from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby opens up into a series of abstract phrases.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Chosen by The American Scholar editors as one of the “ten best sentences,” the passage, writes Roy Peter Clark, achieves quite a feat: “Long sentences don’t usually hold together under the weight of abstractions, but this one sets a clear path to the most important phrase, planted firmly at the end, ‘his capacity for wonder.’”
Jane Wong at Tin House’s blog “The Open Bar” quotes the hypnotic sentence below from Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Letter from Home.”
I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, I baked the bread, I brewed the tea, I washed the clothes, I dressed the children; the cat meowed, the dog barked, the horse neighed, the mouse squeaked, the fly buzzed, the goldfish living in a bowl stretched its jaws; the door banged shut, the stairs creaked, the fridge hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot boiled, the gas hissed through the stove, the tree branches heavy with snow crashed against the roof; my heart beat loudly thud! thud!, tiny beads of water grew folds, I shed my skin…
Kincaid’s sentences, Wong writes, “have the ability to simultaneously suspend and propel the reader. We trust her semi-colons and follow until we are surprised to find the period. We stand on that rock of a period-with water all around us, and ask: how did we get here?”
The blog Paperback Writer brings us the “puzzle” below from notorious long-sentence-writer Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”:
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the water of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the Mouth -- rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
Blogger Rebecca quotes Woolf as a challenge to her readers to become better writers. “This sentence is not something to be feared,” she writes, “it is something to be embraced.”
Finally, from The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, we have the very Molly Bloom-like sentence below from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run:
But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry had been talking about marriage for a while and anyway laughed when she told him in early February about missing her period and said Great she was terribly frightened and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there was so much nice in him she couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he made her be proud) they were married after her missing her second period in March and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the feeling of being alone would melt a little with a little drink.
Sentences like these, writes Barnes & Noble blogger Hanna McGrath, “demand something from the reader: patience.” That may be so, but they reward that patience with delight for those who love language too rich for the pinched limitations of workaday grammar and syntax.