AJ Dunn Reads

  Dubliners by James Joyce Dubliners was a far more successful book that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for me. The stories were easier to comprehend. The stories are mainly concerned with everyday Dublin life, full of longing, the difficulties of the mundane, life and death, and Dublin life compared to life in the wider world. The standout stories for me were "Eveline," "Counterparts," "The Boarding House," and "The Dead." One thing that bothered me was that all of the stories ended rather abruptly, without any sort of satisfying resolution, except for "The Dead," which felt like the most successful and complete story of the bunch. It is still a style of work that doesn't work for me overall. The language is stiff and overly complicated--definitely a product of its time. Many of the stories were also very much concerned with alcohol and prostitution, topics that don't really interest me, yet also concerns of their ti...

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce I'm not going to pretend that I fully understood this book. It is a prose style that is beyond my faculties. The story is about Stephen Dedalus as he comes of age, his relationship with Catholocism, sin or the perception of sin, and his path away from the church and toward art (namely, poetry). The prose style matures as Stephen matures, with one whole chapter deovoted to scripture as it relates to sin and Stephen's struggling with the potential for being hell-bound due to his relations with a girl out of wedlock. Beyond that, I was mostly lost. The dialogue was difficult, being of a time and using a lot of old Irish slang, as well as a bunch of Latin and lofty discussions about art and religion. Not much more to be said about it. This book is canonical and highly praised, but far beyond what my brain is capable of grasping. I give it 3 stars.