…and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Yay for me, after seven years of trying and at least half a dozen aborted attempts, I have finally finished reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. 
It was made significantly easier this time with an edition that I bought here in Tokyo which had a) considerably larger print than my copy in Melbourne, and b) a 254-page appendix explaining all of the could obscure and not so obscure references and vocabulary. (If you’re wondering what length of a book needs a 254 page explanation, in this print it’s 933 pages.)
Telling you the “storyline” scarcely gives away anything at all. The story is set on a single day, June 16 1904 in Dublin. is roughly follows the life of Leopold Bloom, an ad spruiker who’s looking for a son-surrogate and sort-of finds one, in the form of a young scholar named Stephen Dedalus. In the meantime, he attends a funeral and his wife cheats on him in his absence.
Each chapter dovetails with events in Homer’s Odyssey although the links are often so tenuous that the critical notes are indispensable to noticing them. (For example, in one episode, a wooden table randomly emits a violent cracking sound; you are supposed to recognise that this mimics Zeus’s sending of a thunder clap of approval in the corresponding episode of the Odyssey.) Unfortunately, or at least unfortunately in terms of understanding the book with any ease, the Odyssey is not the only text that is cross-referenced in the novel. Literary allusions abound; to understand even the most basic of these on your own you would need an encyclopaedic recall of most plays by Shakespeare, the Bible, and probably the Oxford English Dictionary (long version.) Luckily, Declan Kiberd, ed, and his cronies have already done the hard yards and all you have to do is look in the back for enlightenment. With its convoluted structure and experiments in style, this is definitely a book for rereading rather than reading, but now that I’ve done it once, I’m sure I can do it again! Bonuses, a) I don’t have to lug the brick around any more and b) I can go to Kyoto tomorrow with a clear conscience. Now, sleep.
