A mixed bag. A few excellent stories with strong themes and emotional impact, a few that feel entirely disposable, and others that are pretty alright. I quite enjoy the overall construction, and Joyce is a great writer, but too much of it was a drag to trudge through for me to consider Dubliners especially noteworthy. ( )

This was a cute book that showed the web of relationships that occur in a city. I loved the cute scenes about love and friendship inspired by real life. The scenes weren't even glorified, but stated as they were. It really felt like I was getting insight into the private lives of the characters. ( )

What is there left to say about this great literary work? Buy it, read it, reflect and read it again!! Although it has been read and discussed for over 100 years, each reader will have their own relationship with the book- recognizing similar characters, thoughts, and situations in their lives. That's what makes it timeless! ( )

I found this collection of Joyce's short stories less compelling and insightful than I had expected, and of variable quality and impact. ( )

I sometimes feel Goodreads is a place to record for posterity misrememberings, misreadings. This struck me forcibly as I came to scribble thoughts on ‘Dubliners’. I have not ever been more appalled by my lack of critical sense in my younger self than with this book. Read quickly in its entirety at 16, I have since bought entirely into the high level critical myth about ‘The Dead’ (and read that story again many times). By which I mean the view which states that here is one of the most magnificent examples of the genre, worthy of its place in any anthology whose goal is to be authoritative and one which is also entirely suitable to be published on its own. The issuing of the story in its own self contained form is an interesting phenomenon and one which of course predates eBooks as any quick search on Goodreads will show. I’d go further and say that the Huston film was the final affirmation of that story’s status, nothing less than a canonical endorsement. This is all fine to an extent but viewing the rest of ‘Dubliners’ as a kind of virtuosic trial for the masterpiece with which it ends misses so much not only about the rest of the book but what reading the other stories first can reveal to us about ‘The Dead’. I do understand that in the world of Joyce scholarship this view would be regarded as so trite and self evident that it would be embarrassing to comment on it, but in the world of ‘real’ readers I think it can’t be repeated enough.
It is not just that the book is, as I have said, a brilliant exercise in variety, of the continual reinvention of the form and its conventions, of an adoption of a new voice for each story complete with stylistical difficulties overcome with laughable ease, but as much that within this abundance of riches there is a brilliantly sustained set of themes and a patterning which could only be achieved with a musician’s ear and compositional sense. We move from underlying unease (‘The Sisters’) to downright disturbing (‘An Encounter’) from bleakness and tragedy (‘Eveline’) to something so new and real (‘Araby’) that it would not be out of place in an anthology of new stories from the 21st century. And this is less than a quarter of the way into the book.
Next, see what Joyce does in ‘After the Race’. This is the sort of material that Hemingway would have picked up and run with, in some ways the most obviously ‘modern’ subject matter in the collection, but Joyce deliberately subverts the newness of car racing into something Jamesian. Not just in its narrative development but in its style and syntax. Well, actually, I think Joyce realises the issues with the Jamesian sentence and unfussily replaces it with something better:
'At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homewards and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry’
I could go on, but my by now tiresomely obvious concluding point is the impact 'The Dead' has. You realise holding the book that you are reading something that is approximately a third of the overall length which is intriguing. The very opening sentence with its unliteral use of ‘literally’ emphasises how deeply into that world you are because of the immersive effect of the previous stories. And what a perfectly poised story this is, what a devastating emotional effect it has. There is nothing new to say about it, but I can't help being struck by its obvious influences Tolstoy, Chekov, Ibsen, James and the extent to which Joyce has shaped and perfected them and matched them to the environment.
You've already spent too long reading this review - pick up the book now. ( )