Don't read this book

Let me start by saying I'm biased because I hate this book.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is a melancholy stream-of-conscious nightmare that goes on for WAY too long.

Joyce, the writer, doesn't seem to care about the reader at all because there is zero exposition, zero explanation, and zero punctuation. As a writer I think that this style of book is super lazy. There's probably a "message" hidden in there somewhere but I don't see why I need to dig through the book and decipher sentences to figure it out.

I keep asking myself, "Why is this considered a classic?" I only suffered through it for a class and SparkNotes was my best friend.

I highly recommend reading something else.

Thank you for coming to my TEdx Talk.