Geoff's Reviews > Ulysses
Ulysses
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Reading Finnegans Wake is a vastly different experience than reading Ulysses but it does pull one's thoughts back, riverain, to this, perhaps the single richest and most rerereadable book in the English language. (Shakespeare's corpus is an analog; one can revisit it endlessly and dig and dig and continue to unearth the rarest minerals, gems, fossils, strange stones and fresh human bones; one can always feel the newness even after a dozen readings). Though I'm reading the Wake right now, I've been daydreaming again of Bloom and Dedalus and Molly and Blazes Boylan and the Citizen and Gerty MacDowell and Buck Mulligan and The Man in the Macintosh and the winds blowing through the offices of the Freeman's Journal and Circe's phantasmagoria and Hamlet and there have been rocks wandering and ships amast and Osip Mandelstam's "Insomnia. Homer. Taut Sails... To an alien land, like a phalanx of cranes- foam of the gods on the heads of the kings- where do you sail? what would the things of Troy be to you, Achaeans, without Helen?" (or Penelope or Molly or Anna Livia Plurabelle who haveth childers everywhere) or the sea or Homer all moves by love's glow and the black sea thundering its oratory- and lying down among rocks or submerging in shoals to ponder the visible and the invisible and the sun spinning round one infinite day only. Time halts. It's a shame so many people consider this book unreadable or unendurable or that there is not time for books such as these. Time is all laid out already and already everything has happened and will happen again, but still the moment of each meeting is sweet. Return to books like these, take on books like these and live with them; Homer is still alive and so is Joyce and life is too like these books to not read them while you are able. Say yes.
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Quotes Geoff Liked

“Come on, you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie, that's yanked to glory most half this planet from 'Frisco Beach to Vladivostok. The Deity ain't no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that he's on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the grandest thing yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in king Jesus. You'll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He's got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his backpocket. Just you try it on.”
― Ulysses
― Ulysses

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― Ulysses
― Ulysses

“He is gone from mortal haunts: O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the shaggy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.”
― Ulysses
― Ulysses

“Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.”
― Ulysses
― Ulysses
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
(Other Paperback Edition)
Finished Reading
June 28, 2007
– Shelved
January 30, 2010
– Shelved as:
favorites
June 3, 2010
– Shelved
(Other Paperback Edition)
November 15, 2013
– Shelved as:
infinite-books
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Kiof
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Jan 25, 2013 12:39PM

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That is certainly a great way to do it. I've reread specific sections on and off since my first complete reading of the book. I've read the entire thing twice, and some sections many many times. The Burgess study has got me all fired up to do an entire reading again, but for now I'm chipping away at the Wake, little by little....



Mark how the book changes with me; mark how the book and I grow old together. (Some marriages do last--)



Congrats Fernando! You've ascended the mountain!