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Greetings Beautiful Froggies Near and Far! It is 9 May 2026 and yesterday I celebrated finishing "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce by having a glass of Pinot Griogio. That will be the new book completion ceremony along with the ceremonial moving of the bookmark from the last book finished to the new one I will be starting. Do you have any routines or rituals following the completion of reading a book or if you are an author, completing a work of writing? . . . if not, you need one! And I expect formality and deportment with it! ! ! haha. . . There should be some sort of auditory as well as visual aspect of your ceremony or ritual! Is that too much? Yeah, I know. But was fun to imagine. Reading afterall requires an imagination even if it is non-fiction you are reading. If you do not have imagination, I do not think you can really read anything and secure from it the greatest of all pleasures that may be gained from it. If you perfect that imagination from/while reading, perhaps you too can become the next Don Quixote! ! But I digress. . . Back to the topic after that Shandian Tangent. Now, I have read or tried to read I should say the following works by James Joyce in this order as well: A) Finnegan's Wake. B) Ulysses. C) Dubliners and now most recently finished D) A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The last one I read the Barnes and Noble Classics publication of it which also included Dubliners. However, I read the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics versions of all the others. I DNF'd Finnegan's Wake at about page 25. I completed reading Ulysses but found it boring or otherwise didn't really enjoy it. Dubliners I literally just finished reading on 2 May 2026 and shared my thoughts here on that already. In short, I enjoyed that more than the previous two. And Now I finished "A Portrait" as I am going to shorten the name to make it easier to type. Pardon me, may I interrupt your train of thought a moment and ask: Do you think names for books can be too long? Is this one too long? I kind of think so. Otherwise I wouldn't shorten it, right? This one, A Portrait, I liked best of all his works. This one flowed nicely and has a lot to offer the reader in terms of the story line of the life of this young boy sent off to religious school. He has a unique name and that perhaps has influenced his life to make him a unique individual. Do you think that is possible that one's name given actually has an impact on the trajectory of their life or who they become? I most certainly believe that that is the case. In fact, I feel that without a doubt. How about you? I liked how the book shifted in its ways of writing as the boy progressed from childhood to that of a late teenager. I think close to the end of the book he was still under 20 years old. If not was right about that age. I am not going to spoil what the "artist" was in him. I can tell you, I did not think he would be going anywhere as a poet. The book at one point is pretty scandalous and I wouldn't be surprised if that could have or maybe earned it the badge of being a banned book. I am not that into the whole banned book category, I don't pay much attention to that. So maybe you as a reader if you care about that will look it up. . was it a bannded book? I don't know. Don't care. However, I enjoyed that section. I enjoyed the book very much from start to finish. However, now to what I really enjoyed most about the book and that was in the fifth and last chapter. Well let me digress a bit. The book is roughly 225 pages and only divided into 5 chapters and the last chapter was about 75 pages. So if you like short chapters that you can finish in one sitting, this book will upset you a bit in that regard. Unless you are a fast reader and can breeze through 45 pages. I am not that kind of reader. Now, the part I loved most about the book was the exposition in chapter five where Stephen talks with one of his friends at the religious school about ART and BEAUTY and what is ART or what SHOULD "art" be? and What is Beauty? (Aesthetic). . . What makes something beautiful or not? And what should be the purpose or goal of art. In reading this section, it brought me back to reading Plato's Symposium etc and Aristotle and philosophyers Santayana and Spinoza all who touched on this topic and each with different philosophies and perspectives on it. James Joyce tied in Plato and Aristotle's works into the book. Spinoza lived in the 1600s so he definitely was available to James at this writing. Santayana came early in the 1900s so it is understandable why he would not be mentioned. I will be going back to my notebooks on both of those as well as Aristotle and Plato to bring those closer to the forefront of my mind as I will re-read that section of Chapter 5 and then plan to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts on an Adventure to see how it can be applied or viewed from James Joyce's perspective. I am looking forward to that adventure! Because I thoroughly enjoyed this one from start to finish with no real complaints other than the length of the chapters, I am adding this one to my favorites of all time. I am so happy that I did not completely tank James Joyce after DNF'ing Finnegan's Wake because it is simply unintelligible. Scholars are yet still trying to figure it out. One day with some other readers (i hope) to join me I will embark on re-reading it and trying to enjoy it for the ART sake of it alone without trying to really understand it; rather just to feel it. As I believe is how one should approach reading poetry. Especially poetry that is more abstract in its presentation. A Portrait generated a lot of thought / discussion questions from my read of it and I hope that you will enjoy pondering them now. Now I am embarking on reading "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy. I have read other works of his and enjoyed them, some of which made their way into my favorites of all time as well. I also feel that Jude is going to follow nicely the very theme at the heart of A Portrait, so am anticipating when I finish that this book will play an instrumental role in my thoughts on Jude as well. Let's see if I am correct. 
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Discussion / Thought Questions Inspired by my Reading of this Book:
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