Ulysses

I'm going to start off with the most pretentious item on my list, because that's how I roll.

Full disclosure: I read Ulysses of my own accord, not because I thought it would be an enlightening experience or because I was a fan of post-modern whatever-the-fuck, but because I had heard that it was one of the hardest books to read and I wanted to be able to say that I had read it.

It took me four years.

Some parts were excruciating. There are hundreds of pages of complete nonsense. If you're familiar with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's Cantos, or Rimbaud's Illuminations, it's like that.

Here's an actual quote from the book. It's from chapter 14, Oxen of the Sun, which is where I really started to slow down:

Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitable by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction.

If you try to make sense of it, you are insane.

Like that long chapter in Dorian Grey, where Wilde goes on about all the pretty junk Dorian was keeping, this book is more an immersion than a narrative. Reading it without stopping brought more meaning to the text than trying to assign meaning to every word or phrase.

Do I recommend reading it? Not really. At least, not in the way you'd read most books. I think Marilyn Monroe understood it:

She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively.

That's a good way to look at things that are perhaps too weird, too lengthy, or too complex to absorb at once. We have a lifetime to satiate our senses. Why rush them?