He liked thick word soup

Just picked this up yesterday on a lark and glad I did. I love the way the sentences from "Ulysses" are floating around in the "soup." Since I didn't read Guide, at first I thought the object was to string the sentences, which are excerpted from throughout the text, in chronological order and was getting a bit frustrated. After studying the Guide I realized that the object was to find the "greyed-out" words in the text from the sentences in the soup. The book comprises 264,834 words using a vocabulary of 30,030 words; the most frequent being "the" with 14,905 occurrences (avinash.vora 2008), so there are a lot of sentences and words to choose from. Savor the mixture rather than approach it like timed-puzzle. Play with your food and work the sentences around with your fingers reciting them aloud. I was completing the episodes in about 8 minutes each, but that is too fast. Slow down and enjoy the genius of Joyce. Happy Bloomsday!

What a fantastic, multidimensional way to get out of the rut of single perception thinking. Initially you'll be tempted to "solve" the immediate task of un-jumbling, finding and manipulating the intended word(s) onto the unfinished sentence to "complete" the sentence as quickly as possible, as in most electronic "games." But, amazingly, the slurping-soup sound and the genius of reading lines written by James Joyce out of context THEN fitting the highlighted word(s) into place makes an entirely new stream of consciousness experience happen. My advice: SLOW DOWN. Discover as many surprising word combinations as your life allows. Play with the words with one finger, two fingers, both hands, maybe even the tip of your nose in ways your literature teachers never imagined! Marvel at the images Joyce created completely segregated from context. Stretch the words, you get to do that LITERALLY here! A whole new way to play with words. Weird, addictive, mesmerizing, FUN.