Ulysses, by James Joyce

Yeah yeah, widely praised book that no one has actually read because it’s too damn hard. Whatever. It’s a pinnacle of literary achievement.

Throughout the work, Joyce is extremely creative and particular in how he writes what he writes, to the point where any alternate verb conjugation would alter the ideas he’s trying to express. He uses all manner of forms of the written word to explore his themes, once even writing a chapter as if it were a catechism when playing around with ideas of indoctrination and putting the characters in their place in the universe and what they take for granted. Joyce writes with both meter and common slang, depending on the themes he’s working with. The section “The Oxen of the Sun” takes the reader on a literary stylistic journey spanning virtually all of literature in chronological order, making this an incredible history of literature in just one book. Granted, at some times it does just feel like Joyce was trying to outdo his own genius, but in effect, that’s exactly what he did.

His most striking form of writing is the stream of consciousness style. Never before had a writer so perfectly captured the way we think in written form. He records how our thoughts meander, even to the point of being unintelligible, but that’s who we are. We can be impulsive and irrational and emotional and yet also humorous, loving, and deep. Ulysses is very likely the best way for some distant alien to get into our heads and see how we tick.

And to top it all off, the novel is filled with a rich discussion on ideas of how we deal with life, with death, with love, with sex, with religion, with country, with our friends, and with our enemies. I do expect a lot of the allusions and puns will get lost in translation, but there is still so much here about the important things we face as humans that I can’t keep it out of my time capsule. Ulysses is a depiction of us in ways that only its art can show what the Wikipedia article cannot.