Anyway, however you came to it, I happen to think you're a great writer, and that James Joyce had nothing to do with that

The only enjoyable thing that Joyce wrote are the letters to Nora.

@futurebird @Nickiquote

I took a mandatory technical writing course for engineers and science majors. The first semester was as expected, no issues.

The professor couldn't teach the second semester, and a substitute was found. She decided we should read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I had no prior experience with Joyce, read a few dozen pages and was left bewildered.

I wasn't the only one, and the next class deteriorated into a shouting match between the prof and the students. We wanted the curriculum and not whatever-the-hell this was.

She was replaced after a few more classes and the course returned to the mechanics of technical writing. I'm sure she was left with strong opinions of the heathens from the science and engineering faculties.

I still bristle at the mention of Joyce, and bear a small grudge against the Irish.

It just doesn’t make a very compelling book.

That’s coming from someone who has read Gravity’s Rainbow several times, and enjoyed it.

I mostly encountered it in the context of "if you are a serious literature nerd you'd have read this and liked it"

I'm definitely in the wrong discussion (I fell in love with JJ at 21 and reread Ulysses every year or two. FW I've only read straight through twice, but I reread chunks of it pretty often.)

But when I was younger I thought that "great writing" and a "great book" was a more intrinsic platonic sort of object.

I wanted to write great stories, so I was curious about anything that people called "great" ... this meant that I spent way too much time trying to find a way into an impenetrable text. It was a mean joke to play putting a book like that on those lists.

I think Finnegans Wake could be a transcendent experience for some people with the right background in Irish history and language but it's just not a book that was written for everyone to just ... read. It's a translation project.

Why exactly it was on so many lists of "must read" books that I encountered as a kid I will never understand. I would have been better off reading untranslated Beowulf.

Yes I'm a little annoyed about this.