Well, you know, well, I had a bunch of political items to bring up off the top of this one.

Well, yeah, it's kind of what I'm getting at.

We already did.

We already talked politics on the show this week.

I say we dive straight into James Joyce here.

I've been mentioning this or alluding to this of late on the pod, but I've been reading a lot of James Joyce recently.

About maybe six weeks ago, I picked up Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is a novel I'd never read.

Picked it up kind of casually before bed, I think on a Sunday night, read about three or four sentences,

and thought, yeah, I'm not going to put this down until it's finished.

Read it in about six days, re-read Dubliners.

And then I decided, before tackling Ulysses, that I would reread Dubliners, because I'd only read it once. That was my only experience with Joyce so far. Curious when you read it, I read Dubliners when I was in high school, for school, you know? It was a little later than that for me. It in my 20s and i liked it but i don't think i

appreciated what was going on in dubliners uh what joyce was doing you know dubliners i think

can quite easily strike you on first blush as uh if not pedestrian just a little plain because

some of the stories are so short i think the the shortest one is only about 1,200 words.

That's a story, Evelyn. Sometimes these are stories about young people. Some of the stories in Dubliners are about children.

Something Joyce is absolutely obsessed with and not just in Dubliners, but especially in Dubliners.

And this is evident in the way he concludes and resolves

a lot of the stories. He's obsessed with paralysis. He's obsessed with stagnation and circularity.

Often his characters have an experience that leaves them profoundly disillusioned, or there are people

who are on the cusp of making a major life decision that's going

to really change things, you know, maybe pursue a relationship or in the case of that story

I mentioned earlier, Evelyn, you know, that story is about a young woman who's going to travel

...