Guess what I’m doing this holiday season?? I’m joining Roof Beam Reader and a lot of other people that I don’t know, and we’re tackling the big one. The big kahuna, the whopper, the “greatest novel of the twentieth century”, the one and only Ulysses.
Now I’ve been planning on reading this one for two and a half years. Actually, I’ve been dreading reading this one for two and a half years. But if it was gonna happen, and it was gonna happen in order for me to complete my LOST reading challenge, then what better way to read it than to join a lot of other bookworms and suffer through it experience it together?
The Read-A-Long is scheduled for December 15 – Jan 5. But I went ahead and started. I will likely finish WAY after the the end date cause that’s how I roll. I had planned on reading this one early in 2014 anyway because I really am trying to finish my challenge list by April. Or at least start my last read, Our Mutual Friend, by April. So it was easy to adjust my schedule just a bit and move Ulysses to December and get the extra motivation I need by joining a community of reading enthusiasts.
My experience with it so far, and I’m only about 50-something pages in, is something like this….
**There are no quotation marks in the edition I’m reading. I couldn’t decide on a Kindle edition cause there’s all this discrepancy in the reviews about text being missing and such, and I’m not necessarily interested in owning a copy, so I got one from one of the University libraries in my area. It’s just plain orange, hardcover, kinda old. Thankfully, some student penciled in chapter (or episode) titles because the book doesn’t do that for you. You can assume you have started a new chapter because of how the text ends on the page before.
**There is a lot of french going on mentally. At least I think it’s french. This doesn’t really bother me, it gives me some guilt-free opportunities to just scan over that part.
**It makes me truly appreciate Spark Notes. Now, I’ve always instructed my kids, and I stand by it myself, to only read Spark Notes after you’ve read the chapter. Just to make sure you are following. So far, I have followed the actions very well, just not so much the thought processes.
So, that’s what I’m reading these days. Not necessarily one to put me in the Christmas spirit but I’ve got other people and things for that. No need to let my brain turn to mush during the holidays, right?
Lost in Literature 