This newsgroup is active, but rife, I find, with obscurantists without
much interest in critical exegesis or gossip, which is presumably why
any curious reader would come here. I do not pretend that either
pursuit is nobler than the other. The main stream of thought here
seems to concern backslapping over having understood Finnegans Wake,
or backslapping at having "cracked" said book, and working out it's
nonsense, a la Nabokov, one of a number of people who meet at that
point at which elitism and anti-intellectualism intersect.
Then there are people like the following...
> I think that Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are both
> pretty weak....
> and became slightly too
> incomprehensible. I only read the easy bits.
> But I often read bits of Ulysses; it's a very funny book!
....who are just plain silly. But at least they're expressing opinions!
For my part I am relatively new to Joyce, in the sense that I am an
undergrad and have only been reading him since the tenth grade. In
that time I have read Portrait four or five times, Dubliners two or
three (some stories dozens), and Ulysses thrice, having barely
scratched the surface of it any of these attempts, but being deeply
moved nonetheless. The same might be said for my experience with
Finnegans Wake, which does funny things with my head.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
>> Stay informed about: James Joyce: current reading & future plans 
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