Gopnik and Joyce readings

The story in which Gopnik wrote was pretty confusing at first. He would write about something that happened to him and then change to talking about how the world affects us and how we affect it. I felt confused and lost trying to figure out exactly what the point of his writing was all about. It wasn’t until I got around to page 11 when I finally figure out what the point of his writing was all about. In order for him to talk about our world and the things that we cannot control, he first talks about a story or something that has happened to him. He then compares it to something intelligent that I never would have thought to pair his story up with. For example, he tells about his first Christmas is Paris and how different it was dressing a tree. He mentions how he bought the wrong lights two different times and had to continue to go back to the store until he got it right. The paragraph after he starts to talk about “the plugs of life”. “The necessities of life-plugs and voltages and battery types and ... are more compartmentalized, more provincialized, more exhaustingly different now from country to country than what they were a century or even two centuries ago” (page 11). I had no idea what the point of his story was about the lights until I read the paragraph after. At first I found myself becoming more impatient with the story but once I figure out his reasoning behind his writing I began to enjoy it.

James Joyce’s writing is not something that I would probably pick up and start reading on my own. At first I had a hard time getting into the reading until I was able to picture what it looked like from his prospective. If it was not for the descriptive words and the way in which he described his surroundings, I am not sure that I would have been able to finish the reading.