difficult books. yes! name dropping. yes! preening. yes!<\/b><\/p>\n
Since yesterday was the 100th anniversary of \"Bloomsday\" (the day depicted in the book), the BBC has a Cheat's guide to Joyce's Ulysses<\/a>. It's far more entertaining than the book.<\/p>\n I tried reading Ulysses once, and I think I got about thirty pages into it before I realized there was absolutely no way<\/i> I was going to be able to finish it; that stream-O'-consciousness stuff is tough reading: too much style, too little substance - or maybe, too much substance that I wasn't insterested in excavating, sifting and cataloging - who knows which flashback is going to be important later on, and which isn't? I did read Joyce's \"Portrait Of the Artist as a Young Man\" in high school, but that book was short enough that I could always see the end in sight - and regardless, it was a class assignment. <\/p>\n If I recall correctly, I tried Ulysses just after finishing \"Gravity's Rainbow\"<\/a>, another long hard brain workout, and was all like \"I am the King of Book Readers! Which one of you bastards is next ? Arright Ulysses, spread 'em!\" Well, James Joyce makes Thomas Pynchon look like J.K. Rowling<\/a>. It was a long time before I tried any of the notoriously difficult books again.<\/p>\n But eventually I did dare to try another one, so I chose Neal Stephenson's \"Cryptonomicon<\/a>\", after hearing about it on Slashdot. That book was only difficult in that it had multiple plotlines happening in different eras - once you get familiar with the characters and their settings, it's fairly straightforward. It wouldn't be a difficult movie to watch. I felt somewhat unchallenged. <\/p>\n So then it was off to David Foster Wallace's \"Infinite Jest\"<\/a>; it's a huge, sprawling slow monster of a book with multiple storylines and dozens of characters, set in a strange near-future Boston. It has 100 pages<\/b> of endnotes that fill out the characters and their history with facts about the book's<\/em> world, not necessarily about how the book relates to the real world - a technique used also in Jeff VanderMeer's excellent, and too short<\/i> \"City of Saints and Madmen<\/a>\"; it's a nice trick since it makes the text feel like a small window on an otherwise huge world. Like Ulysses, Infinite Jest has a very high detail to plot ratio, but I could at least catch most of the cultural references, and I felt more connected to the future Boston than I did to Dublin of 1904. It was tough reading at times, but I did enjoy most of it. <\/p>\n Now, after a seven-year wait, I've started re-reading Gravity's Rainbow, slowly<\/i>, patiently. And happily, it's much easier reading this time. I should be done sometime near Christmas... <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" difficult books. yes! name dropping. yes! preening. yes! Since yesterday was the 100th anniversary of \"Bloomsday\" (the day depicted in the book), the BBC has a Cheat's guide to Joyce's Ulysses. It's far more entertaining than the book. I tried reading Ulysses once, and I think I got about thirty pages into it before I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}