A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

Look, I realize anyone who gives James Joyce two stars for anything is kind of an asshole. My feeling on having read this (on plane rides to and from my little brother's college graduation–fatal mistake?) is not that it's objectively just okay, but that I probably need a college-level English lit class to appreciate it. Literature that makes me work as a reader is just sooooo not my scene right now, and I get that that's my failing, not Joyce's. In other news, I stole half my little brother's books from his “Humanistic and Existential Psychology” seminar, and am currently tearing through Viktor Frankl's “Man's Search for Meaning” (review forthcoming). I'll definitely credit Joyce with some of my current fervor for anything that attempts to tackle the field of inquiry of what it means to be human.