#1 Ulysses, James Joyce

The #1 book on Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list is Ulysses by James Joyce. If you’ve been joining me on this journey to savor humanity’s best art, you know that I’ve been intimidated by this one. I started my “100 Best Novels” quest with Joyce’s "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (#3 on the list), and then re-read Gatsby (#2). I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I finally started Ulysses. It took me months to get through it, but I finished it! I was tempted to write this post as follows: "Ulysses: I finished it." 

I’ve been keeping a list of all the books I read since 2003. Most years, I read somewhere between 45-55 books a year. In 2021, I only read 20. THAT’S how long it took me to read. It’s a delirious dive into different styles, Dublin districts, multiple motifs, and Ireland’s dramatic history. I loved it and I spent many days swearing at it.

After I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce inspired me to do some research into Ireland and its history and I became quite engrossed in it. The quest for independence and the civil war and the Celticism and the mystique is all so heartbreaking and enchanting. I suggested to my husband, Roger, that we take a trip there and he agreed. Our trip turned out to be booked after vaccines and before the Omicron variant - our first bit of Irish luck. 

U2's beloved presence is everywhere,
here's a particular quote I loved

James Joyce based Ulysses on Homer’s Odyssey. According to scholars, each episode in Ulysses corresponds to a different adventure from the Odyssey. However, Joyce wanted to illustrate that ordinary people make heroic quests in their daily lives all the time - you don’t have to go to battle against one-eyed monsters while lost at sea. As this expert notes: 

“Ulysses is about the lives of a few people in Dublin in 1904… the experiences these people undergo, which are largely mundane, reflect the trials, tribulations, infidelities, missed opportunities, unfulfilled promises, odd coincidences, small satisfactions, and pleasant joys we all aspire to." 

This quote moves me deeply. One of my steadfast beliefs is that there is so much beauty and magic in the mundane - those parts of life we think we have to slog through quickly to get to the good part. I just have to pay attention and be present for them. I suck at this often and I bet you do, too. When I’m traveling, suddenly the mundane comes to life, simply because I’m away from home. I feel more expansive, more generous to human imperfections, including my own. And when I return home, I appreciate anew the little mundane stuff of my daily life, like my shower pressure, my favorite coffee mug, and the way the light gently peeks around my bedroom curtains in the mornings, while I am snuggled up all toasty in my own comfy bed.

Museum of Literature in Dublin

Museum of Literature in Dublin

I had given up on finishing Ulysses in the months preceding our trip to Ireland, but I resolved to try again. What could be cooler than reading it while in Dublin, visiting the very streets and shops he wrote about in the book? I started it again from the beginning and read it throughout our visit. And throughout our visit, I found “odd coincidences, small satisfactions, and pleasant joys” galore. 

On our first full day in Dublin, we enjoyed a literary walking tour through St. Stephen’s Green. Here is a picture of Roger and me with the man himself, James Joyce. 

Roger, James Joyce, and me, St. Stephen's Green

During this tour through St. Stephen's Green, we met a nice couple from Limerick. They gave us all kinds of great ideas for other parts of Ireland we might want to explore. Roger and I tend to keep our vacations very loose and unstructured so we can take advantage of random opportunities like this. With their colorful descriptions of the area, they convinced us to travel west across the island to Galway on the Atlantic coast. 

Ulysses Rare Books

While we made those arrangements, we continued our exploration of Dublin. James Joyce’s likeness and legacy are everywhere - there is even an annual celebration called Bloomsday, a commemoration of his life and work. It’s named after Leopold Bloom, one of the main characters in Ulysses. We ate lunch at Davy Byrnes, the pub where Bloom ate in Ulysses and where Joyce frequented himself. We stopped at a rare book store called Ulysses, where I gawked at shelf after shelf of first editions by writers like James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett. Roger even indulged me with a trip to the Museum of Literature of Ireland, that was full of both literary inspiration and a spacious, playful aesthetic. We did a lot of non-Ulysses sight-seeing as well. We took the Guinness and Jameson tours, road e-bikes on the Howth peninsula, explored the Cliffs of Moher, traveled the Wicklow Mountains, and saw our first live soccer match.

Joyce chilling at Temple Bar

One day we went to Merchant's Arch in Temple Bar for some shopping. We wandered into Jam Art Factory, where I found too much to love - antique book page prints, funky, clunky jewelry, and adorable ceramics. The person working there was more than happy to share my obsession with Ulysses. I rarely remember my dreams, but every night in Dublin, while reading Ulysses in every spare moment of the day, I had the most vivid dreams of my life. She told me that many people have intense dreams when they read it. It includes a lot of prose that is dreamy and hallucinatory - this is partly why it is so challenging to get through. We chatted at length about other Dublin sites and events related to the book. We confessed our mutual desire to one day finish the novels we each were writing. Our brief conversation hit so many meaningful points that, when we left, I joked to Roger that I needed to sit down for a minute to compose myself. Later that day, while enjoying lunch and live music at the famous Temple Bar, we discovered that the singer used to live an hour away from us here in Wisconsin. So much of this trip was magical.

Our weekend getaway to Galway was a huge hit. After a beautiful day of driving the countryside and exploring the oldest pubs on the island, we found ourselves at an outdoor beer garden down by the coast. [Side note: Because we were both a bit nervous about driving on the unusual side of the car and on the unusual side of the road, we helped each other out by yelling “PEDO” every time we saw a pedestrian. Yes, we are twelve.] Back to our lovely beer garden, and who should we see walking by but the couple from our very first day in Dublin! Neither one of us could remember their names, but the gent was wearing a red shirt and there was no way I was going to let this coincidence go - after all, we were only in Galway because of their kind counsel. I ran down the block yelling, “Red shirt! Red shirt!” at the top of my lungs in my obvious American accent. Thankfully, they remembered us and we were properly reintroduced - hello Dennis and Maria - and they joined us at the beer garden for a few pints and some raucous storytelling while the sun went down. Magic.

Cool 3D art, Museum of Literature in Dublin

Many people experience joy from traveling, but this particular trip, after two years of fear and worry and too much homebound captivity, illustrated not just the joy of travel, but the joy of talking to strangers - the joy of randomness, the joy of odd coincidences that can make perfect strangers bonded together, even if only for a few short minutes. I don’t mean to get too sappy about this - after all, Roger and I have a saying: “You know who I hate? Others!” (Because come on, we’ve all been there.) But what struck me most about this trip is how much we missed each other during this pandemic. We didn’t just miss those we know and love, we missed our fellow humans more broadly. It fills my heart with hope. 

Relishing all this amazing art - in the form of novels, albums, and music - has inspired me to start a Meetup group to discuss these pieces with others. I encourage you to join me at one of the upcoming online events. This project has changed my life for the better and I would love to bring more people along for this ride. Our next book is Lolita, but do check out the events for albums and movies too. Let’s inspire each other! 

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses

Roger enjoying a Guinness at the Gravity Bar overlooking the Dublin skyline

"May the roof above us never fall in, and may the friends gathered below it never fall out". -Irish toast

#2 The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Number two on the list of the best novels of all time is The Great Gatsby. Like many of us, I read this years ago in high school or college. I remember it as a story about love, a tragedy of a lost love. Goodness no. This time around, I was struck by everything in this novel being the opposite of love.

What is the opposite of love? The thesaurus says the answer is hate. Then there’s the famous quote, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”, which we can easily identify with.  The truth is that the opposite of love is actually fear.

Fear of failure. Fear of what people will think of me. Fear that I will look stupid. Fear of the unknown. Fear of revealing myself, of exposing my true self. Fear of rejection. Fear that I am not worthy. Every human on the planet feels these fears from time to time. But when fear kicks into overdrive, it blocks you from all kinds of love.

Let’s take a look at some of the characters.

Nick Carraway: Nick, our earnest narrator, is afraid of being too judgmental and prides himself on being tolerant, honest, and objective. Nick is not at all honest in the book. Afraid of being an outcast, Nick gets sucked into Gatsby’s world, accepts drinks when he doesn’t feel like it, hangs out with people he doesn’t like, dates a woman with opposite values, and hides truths from everyone. Nick’s fears lead him to leave the east coast for the Midwest at the end of the novel. I understand that Fitzgerald’s goal is for us to see the east coast as “American excess” and the Midwest as “getting back to our morals and values”, but we all know our poor choices and our struggles are not reliant on our zip code.

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

Daisy Buchanan: We are meant to perceive Daisy as having charm, wealth, and sophistication. As you can imagine, these are all the things a poverty-stricken Gatsby could want from life. However, Daisy is by far the weakest and most pathetic character in the novel. It is not clear whether she is capable of loving Gatsby, her husband, or her child. She told Gatsby she would wait for him until after the war, then married Tom instead. She had an affair with Gatsby while married to Tom. She drove drunk, killed a woman, and let Gatsby take the blame. She used her money to run and hide afterwards. Daisy’s crippling fear is caring for others in any way that will hold her accountable.

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.”

Tom Buchanan: Tom is afraid of Gatsby’s “new wealth” because it is a threat to his worldview. His worldview is that people with money have it because they deserve it and should be permanent members of an American aristocracy. (Fuck off, Tom.)

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

Jay Gatsby: Gatsby’s biggest fear is being trapped in the poverty and tedious insignificance of his youth.  When he first meets Daisy, he hides his past from her because he’s afraid she won’t love him if she knows the truth. He’s so desperate to avoid destitution that he chooses a life of crime to win the love of someone who never even truly knew him; indeed, Gatsby never truly sees Daisy for who she is either. Daisy does nothing to deserve anyone’s love and admiration. His fear prevents him from seeing her fully. Gatsby may have loved Daisy at some point, but by the time of the novel's setting, she has become just another thing he needs to acquire to fulfill the image of his reinvented, illusory self.

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”

Because of all the fear, there is no love anywhere. I think this is what makes this book such a classic, what makes it speak to us time and again. It is a dystopian tale so terrible, so bereft of any meaningful, honorable lives, that we can’t look away. We want to learn from this, we want to do everything in our power not to live these lives, not to make these terrible choices. And all the while, this grim dystopia is laid out for us in the most beautiful prose ever written, perfectly capturing so many of the other human emotions we all experience. The incongruity is too exquisite, too satisfying to abandon. Fitzgerald sees us. I believe he wants us to be afraid of becoming these characters. Make good choices. Love with all your might.

“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.”

 

#3 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 

In the #100BestNovels category, I finally finished my first book! I’m using Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list for this category. They rank Ulysses by James Joyce as the best novel of all time, but quite frankly, it’s intimidating as hell and Portrait is #3 on their list so I swapped them. 

Portrait is described as Joyce’s “most approachable” work. Set in Ireland in the 1890s, it follows the life of Stephen Dedalus from childhood through university as he decides what kind of human he wants to be and how much of his family, religious, and national inherited baggage he wants to schlepp into adulthood.

James Joyce’s massive literary influence is in part because of his use of interior monologue, a narrative style that is a stream of consciousness from his main characters’ thoughts. This makes for a difficult but occasionally soothing read. For the first half of the book or so, I would sometimes read it out loud and let the gauzy prose wash over me. I had moments of really enjoying it. This style of writing is very effective in showing Stephen’s age progression and what he was concerned with as he grew up.

The second half of the book felt like page after page of Catholicism hell and damnation as Joyce’s main character struggles with his own religious beliefs. It was seriously slow-going for me and I’m glad it’s over.

The point of this project is not to share my profound insights on artists or their works that people much more qualified than me have been doing for over a hundred years, but to notice what this submersion in art inspires in the real world. In that respect, this was a huge success.

First, I spent hours learning about the Irish quest for independence and the home rule movement. It’s astounding how long things take, how hard activists work to push their vision forward, how flawed some of those visionaries are, so flawed that they hurt the very movement they are trying to help. The history of Ireland is so rich, tortured, and unique, it’s hard to put down once you start learning about it.

You really have to experience it first hand, so…. We’re planning a trip to Ireland! I’m so excited! Husband Rog is a huge soccer fan so we are going to try to wrap in a quick visit to England so he can watch his team play live for the first time. This is my favorite “real world consequence” of The Retirement Project so far.  

Enjoy this cute 11-minute history of Ireland. Let's get flutered!

Kicking off The Retirement Project!

Kickoff!

What shall we do during this new retirement phase of life?

I got it! I'm going to listen to the 100 greatest albums, read the 100 greatest novels, and watch the 100 greatest movies. Sounds heavenly, right?

Really amazing art is like a glimpse into the infinite, or like being warmed by divine grace. It showcases the very best we humans can be. Let's immerse ourselves in some joy.

Want to join in? Here are the source lists.
Albums
Novels
Movies