What’s the Point of Reading Ulysses?

One man’s experience reading the Modernist classic

I made a commitment to read James Joyce’s seminal novel Ulysses in 2019. And I did. I had never bothered to read such a dense and notoriously difficult book but always felt that I ‘should’. A few things prompted me to give it a try though. There was an article that did the rounds in 2018 from the Guardian about why we need difficult books which made an annoying amount of sense. Then my friend asked me to read his book before its release for any comments, so I did and at the end is an argument for being allowed the time in life to tackle personal projects like, say, reading Ulysses. I also had a petty argument with someone online about the fact no one reads Finnegan’s Wake for fun and they insisted you could and that I was an ignorant fool for suggesting otherwise. This all seemed to happen at once so it made me stop and think as the new year approached. So as a challenge to myself I dug out my copy I had always meant to read (like a lot of writers I own a copy that I’ve never read) and put the bookmark in the first page and began reading on the second of January. A whole year later I finally finished it.

Ulysses is the story of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he travels Dublin and goes about his business, attending a funeral, buying soap, going to the Library…