Joyce’s three books here are a ladder: fifteen short stories about Dublin, then a novel about one boy becoming an artist, then a single day in Dublin that runs to 261,433 words and rewrites what a novel can do.
The order below is publication order and also the only sensible reading order, because Ulysses assumes the technique of the first two and the city they describe.
Word counts are for the editions here, and they are the honest warning about Ulysses: fifteen hours of reading during which almost nothing happens in the ordinary sense.
Dubliners was finished in 1906 and waited eight years for a publisher afraid of libel; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) grew out of the novel he abandoned, Stephen Hero; Ulysses (1922) was printed in Paris by Sylvia Beach because no British printer would take it. The books are one career in three speeds.
The counts are the career in numbers: 70,592 for the stories, 86,000 for the Portrait, 261,433 for Ulysses, about fifteen hours. Read in order and the style changes with the subject: the stories are a city seen from the street, the Portrait is a mind seen from inside, and Ulysses is both at once on a single day. If you only read one, read the Portrait first; it is the one that explains the other two.
Where to start
Dubliners — Fifteen independent stories, the longest about thirty pages, each written in a plain style. It is Joyce without the crossword, and it is where the city and the themes begin.
James Joyce in publication order
Numbered by the date on each book page. Word counts and reading times are for the text on this site.
| # | Year | Title | Form | Words | Reading time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1914 | Dubliners | Stories | 70,592 | 4 h | Fifteen stories, published in 1914. |
| 2 | 1916 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Novel | 86,000 | 5 h | Serialised in 1914-15, published in book form in 1916. |
| 3 | 1922 | Ulysses | Novel | 261,433 | 15 h | Serialised in 1918-20, published in Paris in 1922. |
| All three | 418,025 | 23 h |
How to read James Joyce
- Stories first. Dubliners is the only book here you can put down between chapters without losing the thread. Start there.
- Then the portrait. A Portrait of the Artist is a conventional novel by comparison, and it introduces Stephen Dedalus, who returns in Ulysses.
- Ulysses last. It is 261,433 words and about 15 hours, and it expects you to have met Stephen already. Read it with a map of Dublin and no expectation of plot.
Every title above has a page here with chapter summaries, the word count, reading time and free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files.
James Joyce’s shelf · Classic fiction · All authors · Books by decade.