iUlysses: James Joyce, reading, religion and technology

I had started writing a post just about reading Ulysses, but it started dragging out and soon reached more than 600 words before I even really got into the book itself. Lately I've been seriously reflecting on what I read and why I read, and my thoughts on this will probably spill over into the iPhone discussion I'm working on (see the Update, below), so for now I'll just sum up my initial thoughts on Ulysses with two essential points:

1. The Catholic/religious parts appeal to me. Having been raised in a Catholic home, by parents who still practice exactly as they have for my entire life, the idea of Catholicism and whether it has a role in my life at all is something I struggle with regularly. I'm not religious or a believer by any means, but with no bad or traumatising memories of a Catholic childhood, it's hard to just cut off something that was such a big part of your youth, so it's helpful to read Joyce, who seems to have had similar struggles as well. This is particularly true in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But the opening scene of Ulysses – about a man who refused to kneel at his mother's deathbed despite her strong wish for him to do so – really struck me. In this scene the character in question is being criticised for this by his friends, at least in a friendly manner, and it's a situation I don't consider impossible to see myself in. I've read about Joyce's non-religious but ambivalent relationship with the Catholic church, and this is one of the elements of his works that appeals to me.

2. It's a damn hard read that I don’t think I'll ever finish, at least not without expending more effort than I normally do when reading. And this is a problem for me since I'm not an academic and I'm not a professional writer, I generally read for pleasure, and there's no real need for me to read something I'm not enjoying unless I want the sense of accomplishment of having done so afterwards. With Ulysses it's a problem, though, because at this point – about 350 pages in – I can honestly say I've read those 350 pages, in that I've passed my eyes over the words on every page, but some parts of it are so confusing that I can't say that I've gotten very much out of them, and I can't really offer much in the way of thoughts or insight on large chunks of the book. There are some truly beautiful passages, but I just wonder if it'll be enough to sustain my interest over another 600 pages. Fans of this blog may remember my initial enthusiasm with starting Proust, which fizzled out after about 200 pages - about 3500 short of the finish line. Twice failing to get half way through 2 classics of literature that I was genuinely excited about before I picked them up says something about me, about what I choose to read, and about why I read at all. I'd say that's an appropriate prompt for some more fun and sexy self-reflection.

Update: My mobile phone contract was about to expire so I was in the market for a new one, and I just acquired an iPhone 3GS. In the less than 48 hours I've been playing with it I've discovered that it is, above all, pretty damn cool. With this new toy in my pocket I can safely predict that in the near future I will be a) reading somewhat less and b) not be getting much closer to the end of Ulysses, but not fretting about it so much either. I downloaded 2 eReader programs (Barnes & Noble and Stanza), which so far have been less than impressive. It's a neat idea but from what I've seen I don't think the iPhone works as a medium for reading books. The rest of its features – what I've seen so far, at least – are pretty damn cool. It'll probably be worthy of its own blog post in the next couple of weeks once I've had a chance to get used to it and reflect on it.