Where do you start reading an author like James Joyce, whose every book was a classic? Joyce has a reputation for being hard to read, but he’s not so much difficult as exuberant and playful. He was determined to write about life as it really was, including taboo subjects, such as going to the toilet and – especially, always, repeatedly – sex (“duddurty devil,” as he put it in Finnegans Wake.) This got him into trouble with polite society and the literary establishment.
About James Joyce
Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, and all of his books are set in the Irish city – even though he left the country in his 20s and lived in "exile" in France and Switzerland for most of his life, along with his adored wife Nora Barnacle. While living in Paris he met other great writers including Gertrude Stein (they hated each other), Ernest Hemingway and Marcel Proust. (Vladimir Nabokov said that the only time Joyce and Proust met, they shared a taxi and spent the whole time arguing about whether to open or close the window.) Joyce died in 1941 and was buried in Zurich. His grave is now a tourist attraction for book-lovers.
Why is James Joyce Important?
Joyce wrote books in a way that nobody had written them before. He mashed up different styles; he wrote in a stream-of-consciousness to reflect how people really think; he made the end of a book link back to the beginning – and he’s been influencing other writers ever since.
Joyce took a sledgehammer to tradition and found new ways to describe the explosive new world of the early 20th Century, along with other Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. He wanted to entertain the reader but also surprise them and make them think – and that’s what his books have been doing for more than 100 years.
The best James Joyce book to read first
Dubliners (1914)
“It seems strange that no artist has given [Dublin] to the world,” James Joyce wrote to his brother in 1905. He decided to change that, with a collection of stories that would capture Ireland’s greatest city – and its people. This is the perfect starting point for reading Joyce and may be his most popular book: short, rich, realistic and teeming with life, with characters of all classes rubbing shoulders. The collection ends with perhaps the greatest short story ever written, The Dead, with its perfect, unforgettable ending. Joyce wrote Dubliners in his early 20s, but it took a decade for it to be published (it was too rude, publishers said, about the bedroom and real people). When the book finally appeared on shelves, it was a triumph. Joyce was on his way to becoming a revered and influential writer.
James Joyce’s most famous book
Ulysses (1922)
Ulysses is Joyce’s most famous book for a reason. It’s the novel that contains everything, all wrapped up in the story of two men and a woman in one day. Its setting spans Dublin, and was controversial because it went places polite books weren’t meant to go – including the bathroom – and, of course, sex was a central theme. It’s even set on 16th June 1904 (now annually commemorated by Joyce fans as "Bloomsday"), the date of Joyce and Barnacle's first sexual encounter. Don’t let Ulysses' reputation for difficulty discourage you: as our helpful guide to tackling the thousand-page novel shows, there are ways to make it less daunting. Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, this is a book that’s high and mighty, and down and dirty – all at the same time.
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How to read – and keep reading – Ulysses
Our essential guide to tackling Joyce's most famous novel.
Other must-read works by Joyce
Joyce’s first novel is a coming-of-age story, both for its hero Stephen Dedalus (who later appears in Ulysses) and for Joyce himself, as he stretched his talents as a writer with this book. Its story focuses on Stephen’s development from childhood, his discovery of love, his rejection of religion and his embrace of art. And though the book is autobiographical, it’s not autofiction: the style of writing changes as Stephen grows. Like Joyce’s other books, it was controversial. Some loved it, others hated it: W.B. Yeats called Joyce “a man of genius”, while H.G. Wells thought his mind was in the toilet. Can't both statements be true? Read it and judge for yourself.
Poems (1907 and 1927)
Joyce is not exactly famous for his poems, of which he wrote two books, but a truly great writer is interesting in all forms. Chamber Music, his first ever publication, is made up of perfectly Instagrammable love poetry: “The sly reeds whisper in the night / A name – her name, / And all my soul is a delight / A swoon of shame.” The later collection, Pomes Penyeach, has a title typical of Joycean wordplay, but the poems inside are accessible, beautiful and memorable. In fact, they represent a break from Joyce’s modernist fiction: a breathing space between the major works, for both writer and reader.
Exiles (1918)
This is the dark horse of Joyce’s published works, the under-appreciated runt of the litter. Exiles is Joyce’s only play, and was based on that perfect Dubliners short story The Dead. It follows two couples and the ties of love and betrayal between them. Joyce couldn’t get the play performed in England or America; only in Germany. This was apt, as the theme of exile was personally significant for Joyce; his work was shunned by polite Irish society, prompting him to live in Switzerland and France for most of his career. Only after his death, by which time his name had achieved legendary status, was he reclaimed by the Irish establishment.
Finnegans Wake (1939)
In the 17 years after Ulysses, many wondered what Joyce would do next. The answer was to go further and deeper than he – or any writer – had gone before. Finnegans Wake is a great dream story set over the course of one night in the lives of the Earwicker family, a looping tale with no end and no beginning, told in multilingual wordplay. It’s a book that is “in an important sense, unreadable”, as the introduction to the Penguin edition puts it. You don’t read Finnegans Wake so much as let it flow over you in a river of language. Almost 90 years on, it still feels like a work of literature from the future.