James JOYCE : Dubliners

'When you think that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years,' James Joyce once wrote his brother, 'that it is the 'second' city of the British Empire... that it is nearly three times as big as Venice, it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.' In Dubliners, completed when Joyce was only twenty-five, we are given a definitive group portrait. It is a book, as Terence Brown writes in his stimulating Introduction, 'rooted in an intensely accurate apprehension of the detail of Dublin life.' And yet, beyond its brilliant and almost brute realism, it is also a book full of enigmas, ambiguities, and symbolic resonance. Dubliners remains a work of art that, Brown's words, 'compels attention by the power of its unique vision of the world, its controlling sense of truths experience as its author discerned them in a defeated, colonial city.'

To be honest, I took the opportunity of #TheIrishReadathon to finally get to reading James Joyce, I was prejudiced against him but I can't really pinpoint why. The writing style of the era, maybe, experimental writing and all that ?
I'm ambivalent about Dubliners : when I read some parts of these short stories, I felt I was being there, in Dublin, back then, watching these people. Some parts were creepy, others were moving, but mostly... I just felt bored. 
That is to say this author has the power to write beautifully, but maybe I'm just not receptive to this kind of writing. I wanted to give up at times but persevered. Maybe I was wrong to start with reading his short stories, I'll try some other time with one of his novels.