"Araby" - James Joyce

First Impression - I didn't really care for this story. It was kind of dry, kind of boring, and kind of pointless. Of course, I read it late at night and was terribly sleep deprived. . . I normally don't enjoy short stories when I do that.
So, good student that I am, I just re-read the story and I still didn't like it much. The way Joyce does dialogue is reminiscient of Hemingway, in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" -- very choppy, and hard to follow. He doesn't use quotation marks, but indents the spoken words with a dash before them - not typical, and therefore hard to recognize at first. Also, much of the dialogue we don't actually "hear," and the narrator just tells us about it. It made all the characters (except perhaps the girl) seem rather blah and dry.
It's kind of a nice story, but like I said before, pointless. The boy wants to get a gift for his crush, but makes it to the bazaar too late. Either he does not have enough money, or simply can't bring himself to actually buy something, but he goes back home empty handed. It's not much of a plot. I honestly didn't enjoy this story in the least.