A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Pretentious and stuffy — this was not a fun book to read. But it’s on my list of books I wanted to read, so I struggled through it.

An example of the gratuitous pompous language:

“Its alternation of sad human ineffectualness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him, and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.”

The long description of hell was interesting — clearly, this was on the author’s mind a lot.

I could hardly wait until I finished this book. This is the second coming-of-age book that I really didn’t like, the other was The Catcher in the Rye.

In any case, I know now that I will not try to read Ulysses.