Standard Ebooks' 1,000th title: Ulysses

Right, and whether you call it "General AI" or "trivial Python script" my complaint stands–that it's a misfeature for the user, the novice reader user, the English-as-a-foreign-language user, who relies on a machine review that tell them reading Joyce is "easy English". That would seriously suck if that happened to someone, though I assume that's statistically unlikely (particularly given Joyce-is-difficult-English is a widely-known meme). It'd be an unpleasant experience, like being told glue is tasty on a pizza.

I *get* that my opinion is an unpopular and minority one, so I accept the downvotes and ridicule, fine. This is the minority viewpoint I hold, I stubbornly stand by; and the hill I will die on. That it's disrespectful to users to inject unvetted machine scoring into book reviews; it's a malfeature and should not be a socially accepted practice. Treat the human user with awed respect; where you can help them, help, and where you don't know, say nothing—don't let loose some talking Python script. The user doesn't know the limitations of your script; the user doesn't know the language you posted on your page isn't authoritative language and is prone to major errors.

AI stands for “artificial intelligence” and I think an algorithm which decides how easy a book is to read qualifies as some sort of intelligence.

Everything is AI to an untrained person.

It works just fine for fiction. Ulysses is a very special edge case in the pantheon of all literature, so it's no surprise it doesn't work well for this one case.

As an end-user of Standard Ebooks, I've found it works pretty well on average.

To put it bluntly:

Different strokes for different folks

Don’t you think you’re exaggerating? I would imagine there are fans of written language in every language. English isn’t special in this context.

This happens in every language. I'm Norwegian, and there's an old Danish translation of Whitman I much prefer over the English original, not for ease of reading (Norwegian and Danish are close to mutually intelligible without much effort) but because the translation is beautiful.

I wish I could remember the edition.

There are books I prefer in one language or other. English tends to feel like it has a "darker" texture to me (no, it makes no logical sense) and so the same book - Lord of the Rings is an example I've read in both English and Norwegian - will hit me very differently emotionally depending on language.

Sometimes I'll read something just for the beauty of it. Other times I just want to get at the ideas.

Same thing in all languages I know well enough to read books in.

I can't at all explain how or why it works, but certain kinds of writing style have an almost magical effect on me. This feeling of well-rounded beauty, even when the content is barely relevant, is just amazing. One could maybe describe it as a kind of brain hacking, which is also what drugs do.

Maybe poetry is just not for you?

That’s completely fine, but hopefully you can take people’s word on that it can be very beautiful to them.

It feels a bit like saying “if you don’t have meaningful lyrics, why even sing a song”: Different people can appreciate different layers of literature differently.

There's an entire genre -- poetry -- dedicated to expressing ideas in the most beautiful and elegant way possible.

I consider flowery artifices to be the opposite.

For me, reading fiction is all about beauty. I liken it to listening to good music. It isn't really to learn anything "substantive." It is to experience a feeling or be transported to another place. In fact, I like to listen to (typically instrumental) music while I read as a sort of "soundtrack." I would liken reading a good book to watching an epic movie. I guess you might occasionally gain some insight into the human condition, but it isn't primarily an informational medium.

As a writer, I think I can speak to this. I can certainly understand a non-native speakers frustrations with the complexity of english grammar, the enormous number of synonyms and colloquialisms, the variety of 'codes' and kinds of 'jargon' that must make learning and reading English profoundly difficult. Especially where the non-native speaker or reader's mother tongue isn't a romance language. I get that it must make certain forms of English - from the dense AAVE of the wire, to Elizabethan sonnets all but impenetrable.

However, I see this 'pragmatism in all things, including art' perspective quite a bit on hackernews, and rarely enough anywhere else. Most often concerning fiction, but also contemporary and modern art. I'm not sure if it's a neurodiverse perspective, or a philistine one, but I can confirm that it's missing the aesthetic function of art. i.e.: the pleasure many people obtain from creating and experiencing it. There seems to be a frustration that some people who don't or can't engage in producing or enjoying certain kinds of art have - that becomes a denial of the value of the work altogether. 'I don't get it, so there's nothing there to get'.

Specific to Joyce and the modernists is an absolute mastery of the complexity and nuance of a wide breath of kinds of English (and in Joyce's case numerous other European languages). To a native speaker with a strong grasp of language, and a love of words, reading Joyce or TS Elliot, or Yeats etc, is like listening to a complex piece of classical music. The use of reference, of meter, of onomatopoeia, the play with homonyms and antonyms, and at a higher level with the structure of stories and narrative traditions etc - all give the reader pleasure. In the hands of a truly great writer, like those above, they also serve to create layers of meaning in the way a koan or painting can contain complex fractal patterns of meaning. Reading a great writer, working with the nuances of language and narrative can literally lift the reader into a state of heightened consciousness. A place where new realisations about society, the self, the emotional depths and nuances of other people are elucidated in a way that's genuinely mind expanding.

It's absolutely fine if you don't find this in literature - whether in a second language or your own. It's naive to assume that it doesn't exist because you personally can't perceive it. Aptly enough - that's a contradiction many writers have explored. Our tendency to diminish the inner lives of others, or the worth of things we cannot appreciate. One piece that springs to mind is David Foster Wallace's essay 'This is Water' - https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

Aren't meaning, insight and import of more consequence than beauty?

You are close to setting up a false dichotomy here. It isn’t those qualities or beauty, it’s those qualities and beauty.

I first experienced it when I read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I was able to enjoy the book on the usual axes of plot, character, etc… but there was another level that had me rereading pages because every chapter, paragraph, and sentence felt perfectly constructed. Some of it I read out loud to myself because the rhythm of the words and sounds were musical. It is a great story, beautifully told.

That said, I’m not a fan of Ulysses and I’m sure a lot of people here would call me an uncultured rube for enjoying Odaatje’s writing like I did.

I feel the same way about reading beautiful language that I feel about reading a beautiful mathematical proof. It's not that it doesn't have substance, it's that the substance is put together in such such an elegant way that you don't just marvel at the content but also at its presentation.

It is very different, indeed possibly the opposite of a show off of cleverness. It is beautiful because it feels that it's just the right way to do it.

This is a bizarrely anti-English take. There's appreciation for the beauty of the language for literature/poetry in every language, as far as im aware. Look at Japanese poetry for one obvious example that takes appreciation of beauty in language to its absolute extremes.

I wish I could find a kinder way to put this but... Don't you think that sounds like something an Ayn Rand villain would do?

Having not read Ulysses, nor having ever moved in the kind of circles where many if any acquaintances had, I can't really vouch for whether it has any specific literary value. Not am I really that interested in finding out for myself, from what I do know of it. But the idea that there's some grand cultural conspiracy behind it sounds just a little bit paranoid.

I don't mean to attack you personally, I don't know you and if I had more time I'd write a more sensitive post. I just wanted to make the Rand connection because I see little mention of her villains when she's brought up, and your post reminded me of them so strongly!

I love Ulysses because of what it says about growing into middle age, facing irresolvable insecurities about yourself, and the solace against these that you can find in friendship—the way you can feel your soul sing when you find someone who wants to understand you. It's a very beautiful and humanistic book. I'm sorry that you weren't able to connect with it.

Just curious... do you ever reach a consensus on a text that you decide to share between you?

Can you actually share the full .EPUB file, or do they object to the expanded size with bundled fonts and formatting, resulting in identical HTML but otherwise different content in the ZIP?

If you want the opposite of that: University students that come into college with strong calculus fundamentals, then I suggest "Calculus" by Michael Spivak.

I haven't used calculus in a decade, but I use things I learned from working through that book pretty much every day I write code.

Exactly.

Please can we stop gatekeeping somebody enjoying a book that's known to be highly inaccessible. However one chooses to engage with Ulysses is perfectly fine.