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You shouldn't read this. Almost no one should read this. People get mad when I say that. (Some people. Almost no one actually.) They think I'm dissing the book and I'm not, or at least not at that moment, although I don't particularly like it and I'm going to dis it soon. I'm not saying it's not a brilliant book though. If nothing else, it's definitely a brilliant book. I'm just saying almost no one should read it.

The reason is that it's the most difficult book in the canon: it's the K2 of literature. And should everyone go climbing K2, just because it's a very good mountain? No, almost no one should because they haven't trained for it and they're going to die. Almost no one should climb K2 and almost no one should read Ulysses. You haven't trained for it and it's going to kill you.

What it's going to do is it's going to annoy you to death. It's not like it's boring - it's not boring, really, except for episodes ten and fourteen - but it's annoying. It's 800 pages of trying to figure out what's happening. It's the most difficult book that we all agree is brilliant. Everyone knows about Ulysses. It's a taunt, a boogeyman, a trophy. Look, I read a lot of books myself, and I barely staggered through this and understood very little of it.

And given that almost no one should read it and almost everyone who has feels about it the same way they feel about the time they ate a fried spider on a dare, it's easy to find yourself reviewing not the book, but the fact that the book exists.

Because we have opinions about the fact of the book, right? Why must Joyce write an 800-page stream-of-consciousness masterpiece in which it's very hard to figure out what's going on and when you do figure it out it's probably farting? Why must people continue to call it a masterpiece? Is everyone just being assholes?

Is it rewarding? Yeah, sure, I guess so. You won't forget it, anyway. Leopold Bloom, in his pathetic everyman interior optimistic life, feels like no one else in literature. And the feel of the words themselves, their collisions into each other and their abrupt abdications, is entirely unique.

Will you like it? No, probably not. Some people do. Most people don't. I didn't, not really. I like having read it more than I liked reading it.

But Ulysses is a rare thing: it's a book that doesn't need to be liked. It's not even really about being "liked". It has something else in mind.

Virginia Woolf famously called Ulysses the work of "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples," but she also said of it, "If we want life itself, here surely we have it." It was a clear influence on Mrs. Dalloway, but she "invites the suspicion that she is awkwardly straining to rationalize an aversion that she cannot justify by logical means," and I bring this up in order to point out that a super smart lady feels the same way I do and therefore I'm right or at least not definitely wrong.

Because here's my problem with Ulysses: my problem is James Joyce. I don't like him. I don't like his style, I don't like his sense of humor, I don't like his kinks or his kidneys, and I really don't like his bear-on-a-tricycle tricks. There's a new gimmick for every chapter in here. One contains a parody of every style of literature Joyce knows, which isn't as much fun as it sounds. Another is written as the Rabelaisian answers to a series of 309 questions. I don't like it.

And that's okay, right? Authors are just people. You get to know them, not necessarily through their characters but through their books. Sometimes you don't like them. It's okay if you like James Joyce and I don't; people are like that. Joyce isn't the easiest guy to like compared to, say, Judy Blume, the most likable author I can think of...but you might.

(So Joyce is not Leopold Bloom. I'm not sure if he's Stephen Dedalus; to be honest, I didn't feel I got to know Dedalus very well. But the kinks and the farts...those are all Joyce, my friend, )

When Woolf called this "life itself", what she meant was that thing modernists were trying to create in the early 1900s (or trying to catch up to Tristram Shandy on, anyway): the interior process of living. Your inside voice, the unfiltered id. And Joyce has done it as well as anyone has; that's one of the reasons Bloom is so memorable. You know him on a level you don't know anyone else in literature, or really in life either; it's a level of direct access that you only otherwise get with weird dudes on the subway.

And one of the things about that level of access is that I think it necessarily comes with a certain amount of farting. I mean that I'm earthier inside my head than I generally let on. The weird sex stuff, the awareness of my body's prosaic functioning - this is, actually, how my brain is too. Woolf and I find Joyce's frankness distasteful; in fact, we find it shocking, which is a funny feeling for me. But it's true, so maybe its shock says more about us than Joyce.

Or, maybe turning into a lady and getting fisted is just super weird even for me and Virginia. We're all gross, but Joyce is gross in a specific way that's not mine, and we're back to I don't care for him.

One of the recurring themes of Ulysses is how poorly we know each other. Bloom spends the book trying desperately to explain who he thinks he is to everyone around him. And everyone, from Dedalus on to Gertie, the young lady whose upskirt he whacks off to in the park, disagrees with him about who he is. In fact Bloom isn't who he likes to think he is either; he's some combination of his and others' perceptions of him, and Joyce does a lovely job of showing us how that all works. And in the climactic almost-twist-ending we find out that (view spoiler)[Molly, whose presence has permeated the book, isn't who Bloom thinks she is either. (hide spoiler)]

So in his creation of a person whom we know, from every angle and from the inside all the way out, Joyce has done something that was entirely revolutionary at the time, which is still shocking today, and which to my knowledge has still not been matched. So. Five stars not for the book but for the fact of the book. Five stars for life itself, because we do want it, even if we don't always like it, and here - surely - we have it.