The Last Samurai

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… tried to mention that in the post as best as I could; in the comment I was addressing that sneering idea that nobody's able to read Joyce. I didn't mean to suggest that Ulysses is a breeze. > Take it for what it is; and if the tone seems too didactic, ignore the tone, I couldn't afford the time to fine-tune it. Not at all: Thanks for taking the time to make an argument! > Generally, I think you're not trying hard enough; to put it coarsely, _you're not highbrow enough_. You've put Joyce on the pedestal of the impossibly perfect and feel content with throwing the rest of literature to its feet. That is a terrible trap to fall into; it can rob you of appreciating brilliant things in other writers that you won't find in Joyce. It slowly saps you of the ability to understand and connect to true genius elsewhere. Most Joyceans in the academia…

Interesting. You're overshooting your target a bit when you rant about Joyce being utterly readable. He is and he isn't. There're passages in Ulysses that will make thirteen-year-olds stitch up, but it's a very rare thirteen-year-old who will endure the whole thing. I'm reading Ulysses right now (a third attempt, and will finish it this time around, soon; I was too impatient before) and it's both utter delight _and_ there are dozens of pages difficult to get through, when you insist on closely reading the text. Those dozens of pages aren't boring, they're mostly terrific, but the density can be overwhelming. I think you know this and you talk about this a bit in your post, but in this comment you kinda gloss over this and overshoot your target. Insisting that Ulysses can be read as a stand-up delivery of a hilarious Irish comic is mislead…

It's hard to name only two. I'll choose two that deserve to be more famous than they are, in my opinion. Helen DeWitt's _The Last Samurai_ (no relation to the Tom Cruise movie) is the best novel I've read in years, a brilliant tale of an absurdly precocious childhood, with several more rich tales of their own value nested inside. Anyone who finds curiosity and love of knowledge one of their defining qualities should read this book. Vikram Seth's _The Golden Gate_ is a smart, funny and moving novel set in the Silicon Valley of the early 80ies. Astonishingly, it's written in verse, in the rhyme scheme of the classic Russian masterpiece _Eugene Onegin_ by Pushkin, which Seth read in translation and loved so much he decided to write a modern American novel in verse. His execution of this unorthodox idea is terrific.