<p>Joyce is very…strange. But I did like The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man</p>
<p>@AnythingToSay - I have House of Leaves from a Christmas a few years back. Haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I heard it’s a mindscrew and that it’s actually pretty scary/haunting.</p>
<p>Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse- Five.</p>
<p>A dash and a number is the way to my heart, I guess.</p>
<p>My favorite book is The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant)</p>
<p>Either Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel or Goldman’s The Princess Bride.</p>
<p>The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud.</p>
<p>brief interviews with hideous men</p>
<p>Pride and Prejudice</p>
<p>Dune
Stranger in a Strange Land
Foundation
The Princess Bride</p>
<p>…I’m a big fan of sci-fi and that one movie, so I had to read the book, and then read it seven times or so in a couple of months…</p>
<p>The Great Gatsby
1984
Fareinheit 451
The Sun Also Rises</p>
<p>I’ve also really liked Hamlet, but that’s technically not a book. :P</p>
<p>^ Great taste in literature</p>
<p>Ulysses
Portait of an Artist as a Young Man
The Sot-Weed Factor
The Clouds
Either/Or</p>
<p>Heyyyyyy there’s the James Joyceness</p>
<p>I’m alone representin’ Proust still :/</p>
<p>I also love Finnegan’s Wake but as I still have NO IDEA what it’s about I decided it couldn’t be a favourite…</p>
<p>I’m reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man currently, it’s a little tough, but not too bad. Odd though. joyce says whatever is on his mind, no matter how confusing to the reader.</p>
<p>I like that kind of thing though. A lot of Proust’s work is him seeing something and musing on how it applies to life in general, and that’s what makes him my favorite author in spite of his works lacking a plot. Joyce is in many ways the same way; but I find a lot of what he expresses to be extremely touching. His quote about being “nothing but a shy guest at the feast of the world’s culture” continues to remain in my mind after two years.</p>
<p>Am I alone representin’ Twilight?</p>
<p>CPA the difference between Proust and Joyce IMHO is that Joyce’s language is a lot more beautiful in English, whereas Proust is translated so a lot of the original beauty of language is lost.</p>
<p>That’s probably true. I find the Moncrieff translation to be sufficient, and for some reason I simply identify myself more with Proust than Joyce. I guess I never really was able to see much of myself in Stephen Dedalus until Chapter IV of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although after that it was quite brilliant and, along with Paradise Lost and Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Fury, really shaped the mentality I had toward myself and learning as I entered my senior year. I think that what I find perhaps just a bit more like myself in Proust as opposed to Joyce is that Proust’s narrator is very much the master of his own fate - he terminates his relationship with Gilberte in being too sensitive, he makes his first encounter with Andr</p>
<p>I see your point regarding the Dedalus not being the cause of many of his issues. It’s not really his fault that his father was monetarily challenged and the beatings and Emma Cleary being of different religion (I think she was Catholic but I am not sure). Whereas Proust’s narrator is the master of his own fate. More reminiscent of the human condition than Joyce’s narrators on the whole though Joyce seems to be more “philosophical” in that sense than Proust. Like Part II of “To The Lighthouse” by Virgina Woolf.</p>