Where to start with Joyce

Meet the Dubliner before the modernist, and Ulysses stops being a fortress and becomes a long warm Tuesday in one city.

Who this is for

You have heard Ulysses is the great novel of the twentieth century and you have looked at it and put it back down. You suspect there is a writer worth meeting under the reputation, and you want a door that does not require the annotation guide.

What this path saves you from

Picking up Ulysses first, hitting the opening with no Stephen Dedalus context and no ear for Joyce's humour, and concluding the book is a stunt. Or going straight to Finnegans Wake on the strength of the reputation and confusing being baffled with being defeated.

The reading path

  1. Dubliners — Read it slowly, one or two stories at a sitting. The plain surface is the technique. By the time you reach The Dead — the last and longest — you will hear what Joyce can do with a room, a snowfall, and a man who learns something about his wife and himself.
  2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — The autobiographical novel told in five stages, each in a different register — child's rhythm, schoolboy logic, adolescent fervour, university dialectic, artist's diary. Read it for the texture and for Stephen Dedalus, who you will meet again in Ulysses already half-formed.
  3. Ulysses — One day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — in the company of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Bloom's wife Molly. Take it slowly, episode by episode. A reader's guide is a kindness, not a cheat. The funniest, warmest, most patient encyclopedia of one human Tuesday in any language.

Why this order

Joyce was a Dubliner first and a modernist second, and his project from Dubliners through Ulysses is one continuous attempt to write his city as it actually sounded — every register, every snobbery, every prayer — without flattening any of it.

Held back, and why

  1. Finnegans Wake — We do not include Finnegans Wake on a where-to-start path. It is a separate question, asked by readers who already love Joyce and want to follow him into the dream-language he spent seventeen years building. Save it for then.

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