What can a first time reader of Joyce say about a master who has more than a fair share of critical and analytical studies racked against him? He's a heavy weight in XX Century fiction. Time to start Ulysses.

Thank you to my dear friend Jonny for forcing me to read some James Joyce. Dubliners was an absolute delight-- Joyce has an excellent sense of place, his stories are rooted firmly in Dublin. He also understands the human emotion and psyche in a unique way. The problem is that sometimes he gets lost in that psyche and emotion and those moments totally lost me. That's what happened in Portrait of the Artist-- Stephen was melancholy and philosophical, confusing, self deprivating. The narrative jump...

beautiful exploration of consciousness and the coming of age of the artistic soul

It's hard to rate and review one of your favorite books ever. To put into words why you love something that meant so much. I imagine this is what judging your own child is like or something. Everything from the form of the novel and the progression of language down to the eventual self actualization at the end of the novel is absolutely perfect. Joyce is a fantastic writer, and is quite poetic as well. One of my favorite quotes of the novel : "His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upo...

So basically this book is amazing, especially A Portrait...This is the most recent book that I have finished and I just love James Joyce's writing style - seriously - that man can do no wrong. The character Stephen really grows (obviously) but unlike other bildungsroman types - it was actually interesting to read about and understand the growth of not just a person, but an artist. The stream of consciousness writing was also just great and it really gives the effect of not only just reading and

I strongly recommend the Barnes and Noble version of this book for the Non-native speakers of English. I loved the fact that this book had the meanings of some of the words. It was quite helpful.Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the book as much as I thought I would. However, I liked the comical parts, the Ironies, and the sections where religion was discussed. Joyce's use of stream-of-consciousness was not satisfactory to me.

widely regarded this, canonical that...don't tell me i'm required to give this four or five stars, okay? i mean, i'm glad i've read it and all, but it just wasn't my complete cup of tea. it was hot, steamy and fragrant, but without a touch of sweetness and a soothing caress of cream. i'm just sayin'.

OK, I have long wanted to get through at least one book by Joyce so after a false start trying to read Finnegan's Wake (impossible to read) I went for this one. I have so far nearly completed Portrait and feel that it is not very good. It seems that Joyce focuses on pointless details, leaving you trying to figure out where the actual story is. We'll see how Dubliner's goes when I get to that.

This book collects Joyce's first to professional prose works. I have already reviewed Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, so this will be about this book.The appeal about this Barnes & Noble Classics edition is that it not only combines Joyce's two early classics, but it comes with commentary and notes (always welcome with Joyce) and maps of turn of the 20th century Dublin that gives you a visual where all these events take place. I also enjoyed the introduction by Kevin J.H.

Edmund Wilson said that “no two persons ever read the same book”, and in my present fascination with revisiting books I read as a young man, unsurprisingly I find I am reading different books. Indeed, if a book, a mere sentence, can change you, then in some true sense your interpretations of the text will always be changing too. In any case, as with music, poetry, or any art, the interpretations and pleasure open slowly and in new ways with every encounter. Joyce’s novel, in part, can be seen as...

I have read Portrait before so this time I started with Dubliners. Dubliners is a collection of short stories centered on what it is like to live in Dublin in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. They are stories of pain and dissatisfaction, and a lot of characters feel lost. They are unhappy in their jobs, marriages, even friendships. Alcohol has a big place in Dubliners. Even though the stories could be considered depressing I enjoyed them. There is an ironic humor in most stories that reflect...

I struggled with these two books. Neither of them held my attention very well and my desire to comprehend the plot by the end was questionable. Joyce's style made it difficult to keep straight the trajectory of the plot, and I had a hard time differentiating when a scene took place in the main character's head and when it took place in reality. I found the writing very fragmented and jumpy. I also didn't think Stephen as a character was really brought to life throughout the work. Don't get me wr...

I try reading Joyce every once in a while. This time, however, his first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, fascinated me in a queer way as if it's the story of myself growing up in a religious family within a conservative society facing lots of existential challenges when I was struggling to look adult to the eyes of others. After all, quite on the contrary to Stephen Daedalus, unfortunately, I was entirely incapable of taking these challenges serious, as a ladder for bringing up one...

Maybe this is a prime example of avant garde writing from the early years of the last century but I found it slow going. Joyce was maybe more interested in the sound of words than in the human beings who spoke them.

I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners for the “new to you author” space for a classic reading BINGO challenge I’m doing this year. James Joyce’s books had been on the sidelines for me for a very long time. My rating is purely based on my reading enjoyment of the two books, not based on the quality of the writing. They were okay but there’s absolutely nothing truly memorable that I’ll be taking away after reading these. No doubt - quality writing is there and his other book...

“The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise to close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand out against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone—come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.”

I actually listened to an audiobook version, and part of the attraction of it was the narrator's (John Lee) lovely Irish accent though the Lee is English. The book is so very Irish that it just seemed appropriate to hear it with an Irish accent. This had been sitting on my "to read" list for many years. The prose verges on poetry, and I loved hearing it, but now wish I had read it, so I could have lingered over some of the passages. It seemed to me a realistic portrayal of growing up, and the ma...

The Anguish of Growing Up Irish and CatholicFor many readers this “autobiographical” novel may be their introduction to Joyce, and for a student/scholar who wants to understand Joyce’s longer, more abstruse works, it may provide helpful insights into those novels’ actions and language. However for the general reader, it is a tortured, often long-winded, jargon-laden recitation of the multiple, mainly negative, influences the author experienced growing up with an alcoholic, impoverished father, w...

Forty years ago, I was excited and fascinated by James Joyce’s Ulysses, widely considered the pinnacle of modernist literature—a literary masterpiece—Joyce’s tour de force. I attempted and quickly gave up on his next and final novel--Finnegan’s Wake—for which Joyce invented a language with which to tell the story. It is incomprehensible; inaccessible to most. It is clear Joyce’s ambition was to penetrate human consciousness, to express primal essence; the unconscious. It is what Cormac McCarthy

Hi,I hope all is progressing well.In graduate school, I remember a professor of one class and a student of another class, referencing James Joyce during a time of my inquiring interests of Irish stories, I'm glad to be done reading Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a masterful work of prose. This coming of age story of Stephen Dedalus as an individual of Irish descent, a student, a religious observer/practitioner (as