This starts out really interesting and then takes a hard turn into tiresome crap. I enjoyed the first half of the book, especially Stephen's childhood experiences, and I thought Joyce's prose worked well with the sort of dreamy, cloudy, half-comprehension of memory and young life. There was something about his language that was so full of movement and life. Then, around the middle of the book, appeared a lengthy detour into the nature of hell and the possibility of religious vocation, which got more tiresome the longer it banged on. Come Stephen's university experience, however, and I was wishing for more lectures on the nature of hell, because the philosophical windbaggery of Stephen and his fellow students was not only pompous as all get out, but it was also excruciatingly dull. That lovely easy prose was forced into badly fitting pontification and it did not suit either it or me. This was not helped by the fact that I did not care about a single character or what happened to them. (Early interest in Stephen petered out as he quickly turned into an insufferable prig.)

All in all: fantastic start, but by the end I just wanted it to be over.