You wanted to read the book, you were excited to crack it open, you came into it with good faith and anticipation… but you ended up dnf-ing it. Which book and why?
Mine was The Maid by Nita Prose. It was for my book club and looked like a fun murder mystery. Instead I got instant manic-pixie-dream-neurodivergent-girl vibes, and I noped out before the crime scene was even found.
Unpopular opinion - may be 🤷♀️ - but o my God Ulysses was exhausting! I mean go write, “Dear Diary,” if there’s so much fluid consciousness bottled up inside you, James Joyce! Why shove it down humanity’s throat? Like why?
Yeah, its the only book I’ve ever put down. I got as far as the scene in the library where they are talking about something… shakespeare I think? There weren’t enough ideas that I could latch onto in any way to have fun with it. Maybe my vocabulary just isn’t big enough? Idk, i’ve read other ‘difficult’ books before and have never had so much trouble connecting
I scrolled down to find the people saying Ulysses because I knew I couldn’t possibly be alone in this feeling.
It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.
I always get about 2 pages in and then throw it across the room.
Dropping Ulysses after the first few pages is a rite of passage.
That might be one of the most famous books that almost no one has read lol. Maybe I will get the courage to try it one day.
I personally think James Joyce must have been a schizophrenic or something. Not that the mentally ill can’t write well. Just that his rambling style is a symptom of disease not genius. Ulysses is a mess, and Finnegan’s Wake is almost incomprehensible from page one, and if anyone else submitted a manuscript like that it would never see the light of day. everyone is so convinced he’s one of the greats but his work is nearly indecipherable to laypeople and scholars alike. I took a class on Ulysses in school and we never finished the book, we just jumped around for a semester. I just saw an article of a book club that took 30 years to read FW. That’s about a half-a-page a week. That’s not something to be proud of, more like proof that it’s utter nonsense. (His daughter was actually diagnosed with schizophrenia and it tends to be hereditary, so it’s not a completely baseless claim.)