A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Tough choices .. Moby Dick has so much to offer .. Gulliver's Travels ... Tristam Shandy ... Essays by Montaigne.. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .... Probably the collected works of Shaw? Things with dialogue feel freah every time you read them.

Ulysses. Surprised I haven't seen it mentioned yet, as it normally is in book threads on HN. The reason that it had, and still has, such a positive influence on my life is the plethora of literary tools which it possesses. It allows for infinite play and imagination, while still being the apparent product of extreme dedication and earned mastery. In fact, I prefer Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man as a novel, and I'm sure that the Wake is a perfect encyclopedia of language, cryptography, history, et al. But Ulysses takes it as an (humerous, profound, tricky, psychoanalytic, poetic, radical) example of the process of artistic experiment, the practically infinite range of the possible, and the unforgiving merit of deep study and eclectic knowledge. I go back every so often to bounce my own ideas and troubling sentences off of it, more often than not just to get a little bit of validation.…

Not entirely ouch. Much like when I read Portrait of the Artist I am pressed between wanting to stab Joyce for having obnoxious and terrible worldviews and steal his flatcap for its clearly mystical powers of English wrangling. I guess those aren't exactly mutually exclusive.