I think the story of the creation of Finnegans Wake is more interesting than the book itself: it was a sad waste of almost twenty years for perhaps the greatest master of prose the world had yet seen. But maybe I'm just being defensive: every time I've picked it up, it's landed back on the shelf within a few minutes. I enjoy all his other work, even the sometimes stiff Portrait. As everyone knows, Ulysses is difficult, but more importantly it's psychologically brilliant, endlessly creative, and eternally fascinating, with a legitimate claim for the title of greatest work ever produced. Poldy Bloom is a touching and unforgettably hilarious character whose verbal oddities will become part of your vocabulary once you meet him. Everyone should spend a summer on the porch reading it.

Arguably the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, his work is a little inaccessible for most folk.

A case can be made to put Ulysses in the top ten novels of all time. Joyce's language is fabulous, up there with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Twain and Austen.

more a lyrical poet in mass volume than a novelist, but Joyce is a fantastically obtuse force to be reckoned with. i personally like him when he's more subdude in works like Dubliners or Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man but i can respect the mass work of allegory that Ulysses is.

Ulysses changed my life. There are many modern authors out there trying to create the same surreal universe Joyce was able to construct, but not as successfully. That book is a masterpiece. The only real thing I can say about it is it's organic- it's a living object that adapts to you and your perceptions every time you read it.

Perhaps the greatest novelist of the twentieth century and most certainly the most influential. Joyce's great contribution to the development of the novel has less to do with his pervading literary allusions, the allegiance to cultural traditions, which is a prime hallmark of modernism, but rather his mastery of narrative voice and structure, the manipulation of time and perspective, the integration of various forms of discourse in the narrative, the adroit use of leitmotif, intertextuality and intratextuality, which are all concerns that serious novelists that followed him have embraced and employed. Although Joyce wrote only three novels and a collection of short stories, each of these works were of high artistic quality, inventive, challenging. Ulysses is one of the great novels of all time, and not nearly so daunting a read as one is often led to believe: if you have a brain and at least some sort of literary familiarity/sensitivity, and avail yourself to any of the several reader's companions to this book, you'll find it very accessible and enjoyable. Finnegan's Wake, on the other hand, requires an advanced understanding of literature and considerable patience. FW does employ an entirely new language developed by the great Irish genius, and in this, is a totally fascinating read that will keep you occupied for years, but might not be as pleasurable an experience as his earlier grand work. The impact Joyce has had on writers that followed him is immeasurable, and this is seen in writers as disparate as Faulkner to Borges to Pynchon. What I find remarkable, and yet typical, of this particular Rateitall list is that Joyce is ranked something like 39th, while one-book wonder (and a pretty weak book at that) Harper Lee is 17th, and two second-rate writers like E.A. Poe and Mark Twain are ranked second and fifth, respectively. Lee nor Poe nor Twain can sharpen Joyce's pencils, but the relative rankings here speak volumes about the literary taste, cultural sophistication and intellectual acuity of your typical Rateitall poster. The opinions of most of the people who come to this website are the byproducts of those unfortunates with only a high school education and a concomittant level of acculturation and discernment, the type of people whose art appreciation ends with The Far Side. Too bad, these folks are missing out on so much.

Great to some, but incomprehensible to me.

Ulysses is a great book. Originally it was banned for its sexual content (the Circe/Nighttown scene in particular, a drunken, hallucinatory episode in which Bloom visits a whorehouse and has some rather interesting adventures). When the word "f*ck" appers for the first time it is more than 500 pages into the book, and it hits you with considerable force: in fact, violence immediately ensues, in the book. Ulysses is fun to read but it is helpful to be familiar with the original Odyssey, and it doesn't hurt to have a dictionary and encyclopedia handy. Regarding Finnegan's Wake--if at first it seems baffling, read out OUT LOUD. The pun-language comes alive when spoken. The chapter Anna Livia Plurabelle is a rushing torrent of brilliant wordplay: read it once, read it again, read it until you can recite the last magnificent hither-and-thitherings by memory. Joyce is a master! Five stars!

Maybe I haven't read enough Joyce just yet and may need to revise this comment later, but I read about a third of Finnegans Wake before giving it up (though I plan to give it a second try this summer), I've skimmed through Ulysses and I read the first chapter of Portrait Of the Artist as a Young Man last night. I'm on a Joyce kick. He's very clever and the stream-of-conciousness writing is more interesting than just a straightforward story. Certainly he can be confusing, but I understand his work well enough to understand what he's trying to accomplish. After all, he set out to screw around with the reader's mind. He said that he wrote Finnegans Wake to keep scholars guessing for years, and he's succeeded. And let's not take for granted that each of his books took at least ten years to write, and he was practically blind while writing them. I think one of the things I admire in Joyce is the personal nature of his writing. He didn't write for readers to understand. He didn't write for critics to praise him. He wrote for HIM. Only he truly understands ALL the allusions and puns in his body of works. If you as a reader can be in on the joke, that's great. If you're related to rbla3573om, it's your loss. But James Joyce's bizarrely brilliant books make me all the more proud to be a young Irish lad.

When he's comprehensible, he's great. When he's, well, baffling...

Over-rated windbag.

detailed and brilliant writing. This is thinking man's literature from a man who cared about style and content.

Brilliant psychological study of human mind. Joyce has a deep understanding of the path thoughts take through his character's minds.

Joyce is unquestionably more facile with the English language than anyone else in history, (as well as with a few languages he seems to have made up entirely.) Ulysses celebrates the physical side of life and lampoons the overly cerebral, but there's no escaping the irony that Joyce's own work is inevitably an exercise in literary dexterity. The real point of all of Joyce's writing is how much fun one can have with language, with cryptic allusions, with word play, with stylistic parody. No one ever had more fun with the English language.