Opinion of James Joyce

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Massive FF.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't enjoy that era, its norms, its "high literary culture," etc. It's insufferably pretentious. That's just me. Don't care much for T.S. Eliot either.

You might like later Eliot better than earlier Eliot because his work is a lot more self-aware, self-critical and less overwhelmingly riddling, but it's also heavily religious in both structure and content, so maybe not.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't enjoy that era, its norms, its "high literary culture," etc. It's insufferably pretentious. That's just me. Don't care much for T.S. Eliot either.

You might like later Eliot better than earlier Eliot because his work is a lot more self-aware, self-critical and less overwhelmingly riddling, but it's also heavily religious in both structure and content, so maybe not.

I PMed you.

I saw! I'll respond a little later in the evening.

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If you're interested, see how you like 'The Journey of the Magi'. It's probably the most thematically accessible to non-Christians of Eliot's religious poems; what it's about, fundamentally, is social alienation after a life-changing experience.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The comparison is as both are basically unreadable.

For entirely different reasons, and in entirely different ways.

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...not in the same sense that Rand did, no.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Although I'll also concede Joyce probably never wrote as big of a plothole as Rand, in that if some idiot managed to hijack the radio waves and babbled for three straight hours in one of the most dull as dirt lectures ever, everyone would just turn off the radio.

The actual events that occur in Joyce's fiction are meticulously naturalistic, so no, he didn't.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

His stuff is all public domain now right?

As of 2012 yes, and thank God because his estate were acting like huge dicks about practically any use of his work that they didn't like, even scholarly citations with which they disagreed.

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Here's 'The Dead', which a lot of people consider the best short story written in English (although it's long enough that it could also qualify as a novella by some standards). Short and easy enough to read in one or two sittings, and emotionally moving. Before you ask, the misuse of 'literally' in the first sentence is intentional since Joyce wrote this in a style of third-person that acts like first-person and is imitating the character's understanding of the meaning of the word.

If you want to cut your teeth on something a little shorter, very short indeed, here's 'Araby' and here's 'A Painful Case'. All of these stories are from Dubliners.