A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce
I wasn’t expecting to enjoy A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man but I mostly did. The best part of the book was the chapter where the preist gives a couple of sermons about hell. It’s easy to understand how a person raised hearing that kind of thing would believe in it for life. If the average priest could deliver a sermon half as well as Joyce writes one, there would be no lapsed Catholics.
Some pieces of the early chapters were hard to follow because the narrator himself wasn’t understanding what was going on around him due to his youth. Those parts were rather Faulkneresque. The book got a bit boring and stupid towards the end. As the narrator ages he becomes pompous and intellectual and less interesting. There’s not much of an ending, only a drifting off. The best part was the middle where the narrator was old enough to understand and communicate what was happening around him but not old enough to take himself so seriously.
There’s one more Joyce book on the 100 Best list. I hope I like it as much as this one.