Thanks for the thread/posts...Love the ten year reading plan...
You're quite welcome, and I'm delighted that you liked the reading plan so much! I regret that I must make a confession....I'm still on the first year, but I also haven't applied myself to it as I really should....so many books, so little time!
I am so very thankful to the editors of the Great Books series for providing this reading plan...in the 1950's, it probably provided a framework of sorts for many college curricula, but these days one can go through many years of English and Literature courses with few of these classics even being mentioned, much less taught. I believe that only a very few extremely expensive private colleges are even offering literature courses stressing the Classics anymore, and I regret that I haven't attended such a school. Fortunately, the Great Books Reading Plan allows those of us who value the ancient knowledge to pursue a structured learning approach that has proven itself over time. Although it lacks some helpful perspective (when studying Kant, as an example, I often wish that I had an instructor to help me along in my understanding) but it's certainly better to have the Reading Plan than to depend upon the majority of universities for a true classical education these days.
Since you liked the Ten Year reading plan so much, there are a few additional resources that may also be of interest.
I've found this book particularly helpful, as the section on Ulysses (p. 251-253) may illustrate:
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"With Ulysses we at last meet a novel that seems impenetrable. It is best to admit that this mountain cannot be scaled with a single leap. Still, it is scalable; and from the top you are granted a view of incomparable richness.
Here are five simple statements. They will not help you to enjoy or understand Ulysses. I list them merely to remove from your mind any notion that this book is a huge joke, or a huge obscenity, or the work of a demented genius, or the altar of a cult. Here is what a large majority of intelligent critics and readers have come to believe about Ulysses since its publication in 1922.
1. It is probably the most completely organized, thought-out work of literature since The Divine Comedy.
2. It is the most influential novel (call it that for lack of a better term) published in our century. The influence is indirect - through other writers.
3. It is one of the most original works of imagination in the language. It broke not one trail, but hundreds.
4. There is some disagreement here, but the prevailing view is that it is not "decadent" or "immoral" or "pessimistic." Like the work of most of the supreme artists listed in the Plan, it proposes a vision of life as seen by a powerful mind that has risen above the partial, the sentimental, and the self-defensive.
5. Unlike its original, the Odyssey, it is not an open book. It yields its secrets only to those willing to work, just as Beethoven's last quartets reveal new riches the longer they are studied.
These statements made, I have three suggestions for the reader:
1. Read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is fairly straightforward, as compared with its greater sequel. It will introduce you to Stephen Dedalus, who is Joyce, and to Joyce's Dublin, the scene of both novels.
2. In this one case, read a good commentary first. The best short one, I think, is Edmund Wilson, the best long ones by Stuart Gilbert and Anthony Burgess.
3. Even then Ulysses will be tough going. Don't try to understand every reference, broken phrase, shade of meaning, allusion to something still to come, or buried in pages you've already read. Get what you can. Then put the book aside and try it a year later.
As you read it, try to keep in mind some of Joyce's purposes:
1. To trace, as completely as possible, the thoughts and doings of a number of Dubliners during the day and night of June 16, 1904.
2. To trace, virtually completely, the thoughts and doings of two of them: Stephen Dedalus, the now classic type of the modern intellectual, and his spiritual father the more or less average man, Leopold Bloom.
3. To give his book a form paralleling (not always obviously) the events and characters of the Odyssey of Homer. Thus Stephen is Telemachus, Bloom Odysseus (Ulysses), Molly an unfaithful Penelope, Bella Cohen Circe.
4. To invent or develop whatever new techniques were needed for his monumental task. These included, among dozens, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody, dream and nightmare sequences, puns, word coinages, unconventional punctuation or none at all, and so forth. Ordinary novelists try to satisfy us with a selection from or summary of their characters' thoughts. Joyce gives you the thoughts themselves, in all their streamy, dreamy, formless flow.
Even the attempt to read Ulysses can be a great adventure. Good fortune to you.
At this writing probably the best edition to use is the 1986 Vintage Books (Random House) paperback, described as "The corrected text edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior." Perhaps even better is the edition by John Kidd (Norton, 1994)"
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Additionally, I would recommend:
Amazon.com Books Great Books (David Denby - Great Books: My adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and other indestructible writers of the Western World)
Amazon.com Books The Western Canon The Books and School of the Ages
Good luck to you in your pursuit of the Reading Plan, and thank you for your kind words :-)