Booknotes 5.13 — Blog (opens in new tab)

Dubliners, by James Joyce, published 1914, fiction, 249 pages. Alas, I didn’t like it. Sad and melancholy, which itself doesn’t bother me, but throughout I just couldn’t believe that Joyce had any love for his characters, or for humanity, and I have as little love for misanthropy as it has for me. Twenty-four years ago I read Portrait of the Artist and I believe I came away from it with a similar feeling. My interest in someday reading Ulysses has slipped beneath the waves. The Old Regime and...