'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' by James Joyce

There are authors who write with needless complexity because they mistake vagueness for depth…and then there are authors like James Joyce.

Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a book about a boy growing up in late 19th-century Ireland, has impressed writers and confounded high-schoolers for more than a century. It employs a heavy stream-of-consciousness format where young Stephen Dedalus’ thoughts are often splintered and disjointed.

Unlike lesser works, however, this abstruse writing style is essential to its theme and content. Like his contemporaries, Virginia Woolf and Henry James, Joyce was committed to portraying the human mind as it is, and in real life, our thought process is often splintered and disjointed, not clean and straightforward the way it’s presented in traditional fiction. Also, Stephen Dedalus is a person torn between opposing political, religious, and artistic influences, and the writing style of Portrait reflects the conflicts and confusion in his mind.

There is arguably no book in the English language which better depicts a person’s personal and artistic self-actualization. Anyone interested in Irish religious-political conflict or the trials of being a writer should read this book.