There's always Moby Dick.

I have a book of annotations for Ulysses (it's actually bigger than my copy of the actual novel) that's supposed to be very good. I'll check it and give you the title and author when I get home from work.

I recommend Ulysses Annotated, compiled by Don Gifford and Richard J. Seidman. Place it side by side with the novel and have a go. You may find that after 200 pages or so you may want to read it without the notes.

Carolyn, thanks for the reminder, I do have MB and the Cliffs notes up on my to-be-read pile. My DS just covered Homer's Odyssey in school, that's what brought Joyce's work back to the top of my list.

Netla, I think you are referring to Siobhan's suggestion. I left that book on my paperbackswap 'Wish List'. I just saw that Gifford also has an annotateed Dubliners and Portrait. Hmmmm. Like I said, one day, maybe one year!

jessyf -

There's a long essay on Joyce's "Ulysses" in a wonderful (and opinionated!) book by Vladimir Nabokov -- Lectures on English Literature. It's a compilation of lectures he wrote for universities (before he made it big with "Lolita"). There are even photos of some of the novel's pages, with his handwritten notes in the margin. It was this book that first tickled my interest in "Ulysses", which I have still to read!

Let us know what "explanation" books you choose, and what you think of them!

Hmmmmm.

I've always wondered if there isn't something a bit too clever-clever about Ulysses. There are many books which can be appreciated on many layers - a good example is Golding's The Lord of the Flies which is on one level a simple adventure story, on another layer, an examination of the way people react outside the reach of civilization, and is also riddled with symbology which gives yet deeper meaning to the book (most of which, frankly, goes right over my head.)

And notes always help to understand a book - I enjoy Dickens, and read the books for their own pleasure, but it's interesting to pick up a copy with historical notes and understand the details of the points he's making.

But a book that needs notes to even have a chance of understanding? and where the book of notes is longer than the original story? Frankly, that feels too much like hard work to me.

Martin, I think there is much more of a 'cult' following of Joyce/Ulysses in the US than in the UK. Over here it was banned for many years and probably still is in Ireland, though that is a sure way of getting people to try and buy copies. I think I can honestly say I have never heard anyone say, over here, that they have read it/tried to read it etc, not even the so-called critics, who pretend to love Proust.

Two more chapters to go and I'll have finished my first read of Ulysses.

I've used the Blamires and the Gifford and have also listened to the lecture series from the Teaching Company. I don't think more than that is necessary for a first read.

I intended to reread Portrait before I started since I read it in high school and remembere nothing useful from it, but somehow managed not to do so. I would have thought Hamlet most necessary, but I'm reading with a friend (an English major nonetheless) who's missed that along the way, and she's been fine.

Hmmmmmmm

What Martin Z says about novels is pretty much what I would say about "modern art": if someone has to explain a painting to me, then something's fishy about it! As for literature, I'm more open-minded, because of hard experience -- there are books I thought were great when I read them at some point in life, and years later they fell flat for me. Or the opposite has happened: a book I "didn't get" when I was younger (and didn't have any interpretive essays, etc. on), was a "Discovery" at a future time. Whether or not having explanations laid out for me would've helped my appreciation during the first reading, I don't know. Of course, Life is a great teacher about human character so we understand more deeply as we go on, and that carries over into our understanding of literature, too.

Some stories need interpretation, at least to some extent. For instance: Shakespeare has so many Olde English words and phrases, that even now, I'd be lost; so I NEED footnotes to really understand some of what he's saying.

As for "Ulysses" -- both the ancient one and the newer one (by Joyce) would need some interpretation, for me, anyway. I don't think that automatically means either one is too clever, but then I haven't read "Ulysses" (old or new), so -- as we say in New York City -- what do I know!?

P.S. I had to read "Lord of the Flies" in college. It was a wonderful experience for me -- so much thinking and analyzing; but, it was fun, and not very hard. We had to write a think-piece on it, and discuss it in class. I really enjoyed that (got an "A" on it!). BTW: I highly recommend the old (1960s?) British movie version of it!

Yep, I have to agree with Martin - I have read annotated books that were delightful and deepened my understanding of the work, but they weren't actually necessary to understand it. Hmmmmm.

On the other hand, I loved Dubliners, particularly the classic story The Dead. Didn't need any notes to understand it!

But a book that needs notes to even have a chance of understanding? and where the book of notes is longer than the original story? Frankly, that feels too much like hard work to me

I think we all have lists of books like Martin describes - if its too much work, not worth it, and at different times in our lives, as mentioned by Laura. Ya know, the Bible could be one of those, LOL... For me, Umberto Eco's 'Name of the Rose' and 'Foucalt's Pendulum' fall under that umbrella.

Lauramarie - my library has the Nabokov book, I have it on hold and I'll look over it. I'm with you on Shakespeare, we don't see any of the plays without reading the text, watching a DVD, then going to the Cliff's notes, Harold Bloom, and Asimov's annotations. Overkill, we admit, but we enjoy the plays so much more.

pagesturned, I've leafed through Blamires (my library copy) and I agree, its a good guide. I also have Anthony Burgess's 'ReJoyce' and I don't think I will retain it as much as I couldn't resist peeking into the thoughts of the author who gave us 'A Clockwork Orange'. I have also bookmarked the Great Courses page for my DH....'Birthday gift'... hint hint.

I stumbled on a Georgia Tech syllabus for the course (!!!) and it too had Gifford and Blamires. Great minds!

Here is a link that might be useful: Georgia Tech syllabus

I finally got around to reading it last winter. I used my computer search engine and found several readers guides to go with it; several of them were study guides from well-known universities. I used several of them as I read. I found it intereting that thay gave me some diverse opinions on the book. The book itself had parts that were delightful and even left me chuckling to myself, and other parts that left me scratching my head, even after reading several different interpretations. Now that I've read it once, I'm sure that I could read it again (several times)and get a whole other set of ideas from it...but I probably won't. Often I think that a book that has to be worked at that hard is just not really worth the effort. Maybe I'm just lazy. I like writers to give me something to think about but I really don't want to feel that even after I've thought it over, I'm still missing a lot.

I've read Ulysses, both the old and the new. I enjoyed Joyce when I finally skipped large parts of the beginning. I had to read it in English literature and I am sure I missed a lot. I enjoyed the history of the English language perhaps because I had to study that, too, in the same course.

But I like Homer' Ulysses much better. It's part of our family lore. One summer when our children were 4 and 6 we went to Cos for three weeks when they were recuperating from whooping cough. To keep them quiet at dinner, very late in Greece, my husband and I told stories from Ulysses, repeating the same stories night after night. Our son loved the ending when Ulysses came home to Ithaca in disguise and shot so easily with his old bow that all Penelope's suitors had failed even to draw.

In autumn there was a children's puppet show about Ulysses so naturally we went to see it. But this was the 70'ies so they had changed the story to a PC version about a son's longing for his father with Telemachus represented as about 5 years old, and had left out everything about the homecoming. Our son stood up on his chair and screamed with tears streaming down his cheeks: It is wrong, it is wrong!

For those who feel that reading Ulysses would be too much work, I think the problem is that you are trying to compare it with other works you've read. In fact, there is nothing to compare it with because it is one of a kind. It might best be defined as a verbal portrait of a 24-hour period in the life of Dublin, and that portrait is painted by an author who is undoubtedly the greatest master of the English language. As to the necessity for annotations, T.S. Eliot provided his own annotations to The Waste Land and no one seems to argue against that (T.S. Eliot was a great admirer of Joyce and much of his later work reflects this). Don't try to "understand" Joyce at the first reading. Just jump in and let him surround you. You have to paddle before you can swim, but if you keep at it you'll suddenly find yourself swimming through perhaps the greatest literary coup of the twentieth century. Moreover, you'll never get to the other side because each time you jump in you'll find something new. It's a lifelong experience!

Thanks, for the encouragement, rule 34. Yes, I've often had "the feeling" that Joyce's "Ulysses" is more a book to be Experienced, than read as a Story. And when I heard the radio version last month (during WBAI's Bloomsday celebration), it convinced me even more. I intend to download that reading at the radio station's Website, as I missed the first part. The Irish actress was astounding. There was nothing "Difficult" about it.