Critical Companion to James Joyce: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work Book

I took much away from this book. It's engaging, well thought-out, and there's so much fodder for thought. One of the main things I took away was this: Ideas are only as clear as the words expressing them. Think you have a brilliant idea but only lack the words to express it? Fiddlesticks, says Bennet. Vague words = vague idea.

I listened to this on audio twice, and also read portions in pdf online. There's a lot of information packed in, and I will likely revisit this book several more times.

The last few chapters include lists and lists of great books. This alone makes this book a gem!

"Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great men who wrote them. They are the effluence of their very core, the expression of the life itself of the authors. And literature cannot be said to have served its true purpose until it has been translated into the actual life of him who reads. It does not succeed until it becomes the vehicle of the vital. Progress is the gradual result of the unending battle between human reason and human instinct, in which the former slowly but surely wins. The most powerful engine in this battle is literature. It is the vast reservoir of true ideas and high emotions'and life is constituted of ideas and emotions. In a world deprived of literature, the intellectual and emotional activity of all but a few exceptionally gifted men would quickly sink and retract to a narrow circle. The broad, the noble, the generous would tend to disappear for want of accessible storage. And life would be correspondingly degraded, because the fallacious idea and the petty emotion would never feel the upward pull of the ideas and emotions of genius. Only by conceiving a society without literature can it be clearly realized that the function of literature is to raise the plain towards the top level of the peaks. Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterwards live finely. It is a means of life; it concerns the living essence."


"I say that if a man does not spend at least as much time in actively and definitely thinking about what he has read as he has spent in reading, he is simply insulting his author. If he does not submit himself [pg 143] to intellectual and emotional fatigue in classifying the communicated ideas, and in emphasising on his spirit the imprint of the communicated emotions'then reading with him is a pleasant pastime and nothing else."