Tommy here

...

Some beefy ass realism (probs Anna Karenina) to see what Joyce is working against. Maybe Don Quixote to get a feel for experimentation with form.

You covered everything else to get a good first reading. Hamlet, Odyssey, Dubliners, Portrait.

If you want to go hardcore, you could read the Iliad, the Aeneid, a compendium of Irish mythology, the King James Bible, the complete works of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Shakespeare, Defoe, Henrik Ibsen, the catechism of the Catholic Church, the English Romantic poets, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Giambatista Vico, the English Romantic Poets, Morte d'Arthur, Charles Dickens, the Divine Comedy, have a working knowledge of Irish, Italian, and Latin and a resource on turn of the century Irish politics and pop culture.

Oh yeah and William Butler Yeats.

But you could just get something like the Annotated Ulysses for this stuff.

Again, what's crucial and most prominent are the Odyssey, Hamlet, Dubliners and Portrait.

>Tommy here
Glad to hear Pinecone is finally getting around to reading Ulysses.

Why Dubliners? For Irish background info?

Yeah, and the random middle class Dubliners return as a sort of 4th main character in Ulysses. Like a chorus in a Greek play.

how the fuck is Huck Finn important, and Vico is more for Wake than Ulysses.

Yeah those two both apply to the Wake more than Ulysses.

I just got carried away lol.

ay ok ill let ya off this time
watch urself