Ulysses - post I

I have read in numerous places that Ulysses is a difficult book and no more difficult than at the start when a reader has to cope with struggling to get to grips with the style James Joyce uses.

This is the first book of the five I have chosen for the Winter Reading Challenge and so the aim is to get through it and still have time for the other four before Christmas.

Bullet points from pages 7 – 62

* The story starts with the focus on a couple of men living in a tower but the focus sharpens more on Stephen Dedalus who is in debt, appears to be struggling to exist as an non-believer in a religious Ireland and spends his time when he gets the chance drinking with his friends

* He is teaching, getting paid for his troubles, and then is a sequence he goes to the beach and this is where it gets difficult because you get a stream of consciousness with words rhyming and appearing to be whizzing around jumping from thought to thought

* Then chapter one ends and a second major character Leopold Bloom is introduced who seems to be in different circumstances from Stephen with more money and he exists in a different world in Dublin with traders and shopkeepers the people he meets rather than fellow free-thinking friends

More tomorrow…