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Comment by demadog | Hacker News Reader

Have you read Dubliners? Such a good collection of stories. Honestly he mastered “great” writing and seems he just got bored and wanted to play at a higher level.

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The Dubliners is my desert island book. I can happily just sit there and re-read The Dead over and over again and never bore of it, there's so much there. Especially the way it builds to that incredible ending passage.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I haven't read The Dead but I greatly enjoyed John Houston's film adaptation of it. I also never read Ulysses but the BBC produced a very listenable book at bedtime of it that I can remember listening to in the Summer of 1991 as the coup was underway in Russia (I wasn't there btw)

Yes! Sorry, I'm just here to fan over Dubliners too. Every winter, on a snowy Massachusetts day, I read them all over again. It's incredible how The Dead and Araby contain so much of what makes us humans. It's hard to explain the images and feelings Joyce brings out in me as I'm reading them. I've met people who think it's boring, and while I understand that different people are attracted to different styles of writing, I'm always amazed that it's possible to dislike Dubliners.

Yes - I really like his writing pre-Ulysses. I have tried to read that book for years. There are parts of it I enjoyed, it was just too much effort for the reward to tackle the whole thing.

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