Where to start with Joyce
Dubliners lets you hear his city, jokes, silences, and exact social weather before Ulysses stretches a single day.
Ulysses looks like a monument built to exclude you; you want to meet the funny, tender observer who came before it.
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.
Books in order
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Further reading
- 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.