James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery.

Complete and unabridged, with an introduction by Cedric Watts

For a non-native speaker like me this is a really difficult read.
I hope it's more up your street. Enjoy!

Book arrived safely I look forward to reading it.

This book is a notoriously difficult read and in fact resides in number 1 position on Goodreads '100 most difficult books to finish list'. It is not it's length, nearly 700 pages in this case, but Joyce's writing style that makes it so much hard work. In fact I was tempted on more than one occasion to abandon it. Firstly it is largely written in a stream-of-consciousness manner which whilst allowing the author to portray a unique perspective on the events, it also requires a fair bit of concentration and perseverance.

But Joyce isn't content with finishing there. He also employs several other narrative and linguistic techniques. For example, he employs phonic representation in one chapter whilst another is laid out like a play. Joyce is trying to show is that there are more than one way to tell a story. The final chapter returns to the stream-of-consciousness process and is virtually devoid of any punctuation marks.

Ulysses's experimental literary structure makes it a powerful but also incredibly taxing piece of work and whilst I am glad that I finally got around to reading I cannot in truth say that I particularly enjoyed it.

Spotted this on a wishlist so going out to hopefully make a new friend. I hope that you get more out of it than I did. Enjoy!

Thanks for this book to grant a wish from my list! I’m kind of dreading it, but I will try. Will read and release as soon as I can.