The reading group I’m in is wrapping up its reading for this year, so at our last meeting, we had a discussion of what we’d like to read next year. Someone suggested that we spend next year reading James Joyce‘s Ulysses. Though it is a long and difficult book (if not as difficult as popularly believed), I don’t think we could spend a whole year reading it. We did, after all, manage to finish all of Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time in a single year. So what I’ve proposed instead is that we read it over nine months, after first reading Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
If we do this, it would be a new experience for me, since I will have read everything before. In past years, there may have a book or two out of the year’s dozen that I’d read before, but never the whole year’s list. I’m looking forward to how that will change the experience for me. There are a couple of very difficult sections (no more than sixty or so pages each) that, reading the book on my own and without a schedule, I just tried to get through. Now that I’ll have a month to read each of those sections and someone to discuss them with once I’ve done that, I hope to get more out of them than the barest minimum necessary to continue.
Would anyone not geographically able to participate in this reading group in person be interested in participating on-line? I’d be happy to post an entry soliciting people’s thoughts about each month’s reading before that month’s meeting (to be shared with the group at our meeting) and then to post another entry sharing the highlights of the group’s thoughts after the meeting. Would anyone be interested in that?
morgannels 