YES!!

AND SO THIS IS HOW I'VE READ ULYSSES

Pretty me, reading Ulysses
hahaha! It's not Marilyn, it's...
MADONNA!

THIS the FOLLOW-UP to my previous post:
"Reading Ulysses: Guided Or Unguided?", so it might help if you want to read that first.

Every REFERENCE in this post is listed at bottom of that first post "Guided or Unguided."

INTRODUCTION

James Joyce's Ulysses intimidated me. I wanted to prepare myself before I began it. I wanted to research and find out ahead of time, for example: Which edition? Read it cold, or buy guidebooks to explain it? -especially on the first-time read. Which guidebooks? etc.

In the first post "Guided or Unguided" I researched and learned the many options readers have, for "how" to read Ulysses.
By now I'm halfway through the last chapter! Yes! Here I tell you which of those options I chose, "how" I read Ulysses after all.

So you can go read "Guided" where I research my options; or break the suspense now and keep reading to see what I chose!

Reading Ulysses: Guided or Unguided?

cover of Poets and Writers. Photo by Eve Arnold 1954
           publisher: Abrams Books, Eve Arnold's photos of Marilyn:  website link

Marilyn kept Ulysses in her car
to dip into for ex. while
waiting for Eve Arnold,
her photographer

BACKSTORY:

How will I go about reading Ulysses?

The way that Marilyn Monroe did, perhaps? I think yes, I will. More about her, further on.

Follow-up: I did decide how I will go about it, and wrote a follow-up post to tell you my decisions:
"And So This is How I Read Ulysses"- this time with Madonna!

So, I am about to tackle Ulysses after all these years; I have a friend who thinks it's one of the most enjoyable books ever, but even as a great reader I felt no shame at knowing I never planned to even attempt it. It wasn't until I became a fan of 1000-page books, and filled a bookshelf with them- stacked, not standing- that it ever entered my head to try.

Here I am hard at googling..
or somebody is..

Will I use my usual method of reading things? Above all I am analytical, and like to understand what I read. I research everything. Nothing escapes my academic approach- the arts included- even the scorned teen series Twilight (which I venture to admit reveals an interesting side).

Why you can't find what you want at the library, PART 1

'The Library of Grand Vizier Ragib Pasha' 

engraving in Tableau général 

de l.empire othoman

by Ignatius Mouradgea d.Ohsson

Paris late 1700s

I was at my favorite branch library last week. My inaugural post, my very first post of this blog, was about the Battery Park branch library of the NYPL system.


I gushed about how the literature section was full of not just classics but modern classics, and even newer books, on their way to becoming modern classics, pre-classic I guess.

BANNED BOOK


It’s not enough just to know only Dickens and Conrad and Boccacio, "the Canon," the books agreed on as being the greatest literature, then taught in colleges.

Hamish ed, UK 1951

Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States.

Everyone reads them, and then everyone writes about them- think of the tens of thousands of dissertations dissecting the greatest to the smallest of the Canon.

I'm not saying there is something wrong with continuing to mine the classics. I agree, in great works of art, the wealth of things to discover is bottomless. Things the authors put there on purpose and—more often—things they didn’t know they’d put there, just following their instincts.

more interesting than the original? 

And I agree that every new reader brings all their own stuff into the trigonometry of allegory. 


I myself can endlessly hold forth on what a story means, or a book, or the movie they made from the book and how it failed (or didn’t). And enjoy myself thoroughly.


It's just that. . .
. . . Is that all there is? Surely great books have been written in the meantime! How it surprises me to see highschoolers on the subway still reading Catcher in the Rye for English class.