So after having finished Part 1 of Ulysses I flipped through Part 2 to see how long that would take me and I realized that Part 1 is only 47 pages while Part 2 is in fact 635 pages. 6.3.5 pages!
I'm a pretty fast reader. It's one of my talents. If you're thinking of being wildly jealous of me remember that I trip over the floor when I'm not walking. But with my mad reading skills I can read Harry Potter 7 in a day. Impressive yes? And that's 759 pages! So you would think that I wouldn't find Ulysses so daunting until you actually open Ulysses and realize that reading Ulysses is like wading through a swamp. Of words. And there are Gaelic words and Irish words and more and more words and some of the words I know, like little patches of dry ground in the swamp, and I can stand on them and try to keep walking through the swamp but those words are so few and far between that I inevitably find myself stuck in this squelching sucking mud and marsh again and I know there are more dry spots but I can't find them because a lot of the time they're covered up with swamp and it takes some sifting to find my footing and sometimes I think I've found my footing but I read one more word (mahamanvantara) and I go pitching forward into the swamp again.
Run-on sentences are OK when you're discussing James Joyce.
But I'm 47 pages into the swamp and I have realized that Harry Potter and Ulysses are vastly different books and my ability to read a storybook quickly is not transferable to the "timeless classic" bog that I'm in.
And I have 19 books to read after this one! So when I realized that Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund is 666 pages (which seems unlucky in and of itself) I decided that unfortunately Ahab's Wife will have to wait for a future date and I have decided to replace it with Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a lovely 288 pages and an author that I have been REALLY wanting to read. So yay for that! And now I have to go get in the swamp again.
As a child (and now) I really loved being in the mud and playing in the mud and so you would think that a muddy swamp wouldn't be an adequate metaphor for how overwhelming this book is but I liked mud on the ground when you can get in and play in it and mold it and mess with it and casually throw it around with other people. I do not like being in a swamp and thinking that the mud will never let me go.
