A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

by James Joyce

This is a semi-autobiographical story, very similar to the childhood of Joyce himself.  It's basically about what it's like to be a child who will grow up to be a writer.  Having been a "sensitive" child myself, and having had issues with religion, I find myself constantly identifying with Stephen.  Besides that, it's an incredibly well-written book.  Some of it gets into stream-of-conciousness and other strange literary techniques, but after the first couple of pages it's quite understandable.  See, it starts out with Stephen's first childhood memories, so the incoherence of the writing matches the incoherence of a little kid's thoughts.  Sometimes this book takes some work to understand, but it's well worth it, and it still reads pretty quickly.  It probably doesn't help if you don't identify with the main character, but in that case you probably wouldn't have been interested anyway.

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