Don't Waste Your Time *

My contribution to the debate over at C&S has, so far, been limited in both quality and amount of literary criticism. Why would I waste my time arguing about a book I neither like nor care about? It's not offensive, a la Mein Kampf, so I wouldn't want to make any counter-arguments against its subject matter. It's not a political tract, so I have no comment to make about it on that score either. Nah, I simply think it's a crap book. And, while I even think that this short comment is giving it space that it does not deserve, I'll offer some additional comments from elsewhere:

"In spite of its very numerous qualities--it is, among other things, a kind of technical handbook, in which the young novelist can study all the possible and many of the quite impossible ways of telling a story--'Ulysses' is one of the dullest books ever written, and one of the least significant. This is due to the total absence from the book of any sort of conflict.
Aldous Huxley
"OK, I never read Ulysses from beginning to end, but then again, neither, I believe, has anybody else, including most of the writers and scholars who declared it the greatest English-language book of the century in that Modern Library list last year. I have read the first one hundred pages at least three times, and then, longing for a story, I never got further."
Richard Bernstein, book critic, The New York Times

These quotes I like - similar views can be found here.

*The Vessels