Reading Ulysses is an odyssey!

Let's see if this cartoon tickles you ... at least half as much as how funny it was to me:

Source

Maybe the book was James Joyce's Ulysses! ;)

How many people are like me who know about James Joyce's Ulysses but have never read the book in full?  I think I gave it three good attempts, but never progressed beyond the first couple of pages.  I do not exaggerate when I write that it was only a couple of pages that I read.  It is insanely difficult to go past a few pages of that book.  

It is the centenary year of the publication of Ulysses.  The author of this essay that marks the occasion writes that Joyce knew well that people like me will have problems reading the book:

It is a novel to learn from and obsess about, and you can spend a lifetime immersed in its pages. Nevertheless, many uninitiated readers view Joyce’s epic with paralyzing fear, something the author didn’t exactly allay with this admission in the mid-1920s: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” The stance is flippant, though in many ways, Joyce intended for the novel to be intimidating.

I am not sure if intimidating is the word that I would use, but I can live that description.

I am with this writer from a few years ago, who spoke the truth, during his graduate schooling, to his Joyce scholar professor: "If I had to choose between rereading Ulysses or Tarzan of the Apes, I'd go for Tarzan."

Yet, when we list our summer reading lists, even the wish lists, it is not the likes of Tarzan that we think of but the heavy ones like Ulysses.  What's going on?  I like this take:

Of course, we tackle more elaborate books in summer because we have more time on our hands, with the season’s longer days, the time off from work, and the promise of leisure in the air. But there’s also a psychological effect at work. From our childhood days, the coming of summer and the end of the school year meant the end of our “required” reading: no more homework, no more chapter assignments, no more mandatory synopses of The Scarlet Letter or historical summaries of “Everyday Life in Dickens’ London.” Come the solstice, many of us experienced something that will never disappear: the exhilaration of setting our own literary agenda—a private summer syllabus devoid of grades and fueled by love alone.

For once, it is not about the grades.  We want to read because it is not a required reading. It is love.

But the reality is that I rarely ever run into people anymore who want to talk about the books that they are reading or plan to read.  It is almost as if a vast majority does not read books anymore.  Neither Tarzan of the Apes nor Ulysses.  Neither here nor in the old country.  Maybe there really never was a book-reading culture and it was only a few who read?

The dystopian future that Ray Bradbury described in Fahrenheit 451, in which books were burnt because they triggered discomfort in people, has arrived.

On top of that, Republicans understand that preventing people--especially kids--from reading books that are critical will make it easier for them to govern over unthinking and brainwashed masses.  Don't you already see around you the loss of a thoughtful citizenry, who are incapable of discerning truth from misinformation and good from bad? 

Republicans are passing laws galore to ban books from schools and public libraries.  They are out to prove that Bradbury was correct in saying: “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them”.  Stop young people from reading altogether, or at least from reading the "wrong" books, and, as one of the Republican standard-bearers famously said in a different context, "Mission Accomplished"!

Maybe they should ban Ulysses again (yes, it was banned a long time ago) in order to make Joyce great again ;)

In a couple of days, it will be Bloomsday: The entire novel is set, I am told (keep in mind that I never progress beyond a couple of pages) on the events of one day--June 16th--in the life of its protagonist Leopold Bloom.  I am sure NPR will feature a few writers, academics, and readers, who will talk about the profundity of Ulysses and read their favorite sentences that are longer than paragraphs in most books.  I will listen to the report and chuckle thinking of the cartoon of a man dead on the beach while attempting to read a book that I imagine is Ulysses ;)