> Those dozens of pages aren't boring, they're mostly terrific, but the density can be overwhelming. I think you know this and you talk about this a bit in your post, but in this comment you kinda gloss over this and overshoot your target.

Yeah: I tried to mention that in the post as best as I could; in the comment I was addressing that sneering idea that nobody's able to read Joyce. I didn't mean to suggest that Ulysses is a breeze.

> Take it for what it is; and if the tone seems too didactic, ignore the tone, I couldn't afford the time to fine-tune it.

Not at all: Thanks for taking the time to make an argument!

> Generally, I think you're not trying hard enough; to put it coarsely, _you're not highbrow enough_. You've put Joyce on the pedestal of the impossibly perfect and feel content with throwing the rest of literature to its feet. That is a terrible trap to fall into; it can rob you of appreciating brilliant things in other writers that you won't find in Joyce. It slowly saps you of the ability to understand and connect to true genius elsewhere. Most Joyceans in the academia, for example, are in this position, and their work is usually no good as the result. They start out with exactly the kind of all-encompassing rush of delight and certainty that _nothing can compare to this_ that you're feeling, and slowly work themselves into little more than extreme fanboyism, clad in respectable academic jargon.

I tried not to sound like this by bringing up Beckett as a contrast. I do think Joyce is incomparable, but it's not because he's somehow the Best Writer. It's that for what he wanted to do, he captured it on a grander scale than anybody could hope to compete with. Other writers on a similar scale — certainly what Kafka I've read seems like he's comparable; Proust I haven't started yet, though I have a copy of his works lying ten feet from me — are similar in that they're not writers you can compare others to except to note differences.

With literature it's tough because I honestly don't think there are very many great novelists. The novel is an extremely difficult form of writing, and not many are able to really pull together and make something dense and powerful. I think it's easier to clarify what you're trying to say by talking music. The Beatles are brilliant, for instance, but so are the Beach Boys, and Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa, and so even in the short frame of the 60s you have a dozen absolute geniuses who are unique and incomparable, all in tandem, and there's no one "right" musician among them. When you expand into world music and the avante-garde the point is proven even more, because at some rarefied points every single musician in a scene is equally brilliant because every single one of them is constantly pushing at boundaries.

With novels I don't get that as much, because the novel form is so immense that I feel there ought to be an enormous amount to justify it. So I don't just think of Joyce, but there're only a dozen or two writers I'm really in love with in that way. Even among them, though, there's an enormous variation in ambitions and goals between them. So I include Steven King on that list because his novel It encompasses horror better than anything else I've ever read, on a level nobody, King included, can hope to match. Anybody who writes a comparable horror novel will have to do so by fundamentally changing the nature of horror.

So at once it's highbrow and lowbrow. It's highbrow in that you constantly have to strive to find bigger and better things, and it's lowbrow in that you can find those things almost anywhere, even in unconventional places.

tl;dr: I agree with you completely. :-)

(I've never heard of The Last Samurai; placed an order at your recommendation.)