Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Reading through James Joyce

I've been trying to read James Joyce's works, in chronological order. I read Chamber Music a few months ago,  and now I've begun Dubliners. Wikipedia is very useful to reading Dubliners — there are individual entries for each story, so after I've read each I can read the entry. I read Dubliners when I was in high school and can't remember if I've read it since then.

There's a passage of Robert Anton Wilson's in which he talks about Joyce and says that Joyce invented the "New Yorker" story with Dubliners. Can anyone supply me with the citation?

As it happens, there is also a RAW connection to the other book I am reading — Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain. In this interview, when RAW is asked about his favorite works, he mentions "anything by Mark Twain." I picked Sketches Old and New because it had a couple of pieces I remembered well, such as "Journalism in Tennessee."

One advantage of owning a Kindle is that it's very easy to obtain a copy of any public domain book from Project Gutenberg in the Kindle format. My Twain book even includes 19th century illustrations.


2 comments:

Eric Wagner said...

Good luck on your Joyce project. T. S. Eliot recommended reading Joyce's works in chronological order. I did it sort of backwards, reading Finnegans Wake first, then Ulysses, then the others in random order.

I also love the audiobook of Dubliners, read by a variety of Irish actors and authors. I've listened to that over and over again.

Eric Wagner said...

I think the Joyce/New Yorker comment comes near the end of my beloved TSOG.