Conquering the Black Panther

WARNING: The following my bore you. It is about reading books.

In my senior year of high school, I began reading for pleasure again. I did when I was younger; I used to be obsessed with the Goosebumps books by R.L. Stine. But then reading became 'really gay', and I had more important things to do, like play Sega Genesis.

But because of a video game, and because of sheer boredom in my senior year English class run by the infamous Mr. Cannon, I started reading again. 1984 was the first book I picked up from that room on the 3rd floor of Harborfields, since I had heard a lot about it and knew the term 'Big Brother' came from it, I thought I'd give it a go.

Over the past 4 years, reading has become quite a pastime for me; if I don't have a book I'm reading at any particular point, I feel like I'm missing out on something. I found the Modern Library's Top 100 list of the 20th century that senior year, deciding since I knew nothing about 'great' literature, this was as good a place to start as any. But there was a monster on that list, #1 on the list: Ulysses.

Everything I read about the book summed it up as this gargantuan undertaking of literature; most agreeing it was more or less unreadable, but all saying it was a fantastic feat in literature. In fact, most of the people who compiled the Top 100 list who voted it to the top had never actually read the book cover to cover.

But as of today, Thursday, February 18 of 2005, I can say that I have read Ulysses in its entirety.

I was originally going to read this book first, but after reading such reviews as this and this, I put it off. I got 36 of the other books on the list under my belt before I decided I was ready to take on the monster. Kristin was taking a Joyce class in which they were going to read it, and they were having public sessions with the teacher (who is a Joycean scholar, yes, such a thing exists), so I thought I'd take the advantage of having a professional walk me through it so I could understand it as much as possible.

I only made it to a few of the meetings, and had only read about 1/3 of the book by the time the semester was through. But I wasn't going to stop; I had committed too much time, and I want to read every book on the list.

Now that I am done, I agree with those other Net reviews--kind of. The book is so fucking hard. You can't even imagine. I don't see anyone ever reading it all they way through just for the pure enjoyment of it. Parts of it get so tedious that I really wanted to stop, and I did for a long time, only reading about four or five pages a week. But I AM GOING TO FINISH THAT FUCKING LIST. In the past month, I put some major speed into it, and read about half the book since late December.

I never had a book consume my life like this; it was like a tumor, always following me around. Hell, I've been reading it since September, and I only finished today.

If you want a VERY brief and inaccurate synopsis, click here. That's the bare bones skeleton of the story. But there is SO MUCH symbolism, metaphors, and whatnot in this book, that although it might be difficult, it is quite an amazing, interesting read. I still can't believe how many layers there are to this book.

I know not many of you care, so I'll finish this up. I literally just finished it 20 min. ago and needed to vent somewhere.

I know most of the people that read this site don't read for leisure. Scratch that, I know you don't read period. And no, reading The DaVinci Code doesn't count as "I read sometimes." Which is fine, I'm not judging. But if anyone out there reads, and likes to read the classics, honestly.......I don't know if you could do it. I'm not saying I'm some superhuman literary master--far from it--but I had not only a teacher who had read the book ten times to consult on certain parts, but I also had the determination to finish it to cross it off my list.

I don't care what the other people said, this was a fantastic book. But you almost have to live it to really get something out of it. If you're cocky like those guys in those reviews and tried to read it without any assistance, then you have to get over yourself--you are not smart enough to read this book without any help. The ideas and things Joyce came up with are just amazing. But how smart can he really be if he wrote a book so inaccessible to everyone? That's not smart, because no matter how good a book is, if no one wants to read it, you've failed.

Whatever. Maybe I'm a nerd. I don't care. All I know is I conquered the 800-lb. gorilla of English literature, and I understood it. I'm proud of myself.


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