Ulysses by James Joyce

I had attempted to read this on two separate occasions, but I decided to take the deep plunge this summer. It helped that I had been to Dublin since those first attempts, and it gave me some context to the "Odyssey" through the streets of this fabulous city. Now, I wish I had read the book before I went because I would have taken the map provided by the James Joyce Center (which was only a four-minute walk from my hotel)! Solution: Go back to Dublin. (Yes please!) 

This is one of the hardest books I had ever read, but I decided to just suspend figuring it out and just go with the flow. It is brilliant. Joyce loved to play with words and phrases. I loved the melody, and the narrator was THE BEST for making that come alive off the page. 

It also helped me to look up how it connects to the Odyssey of Homer (which I have read and taught). I feel like I accomplished a great feat. Just sayin'! 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Ulysses is perhaps the most famously difficult of all modern novels. Its difficulty, however, doesn’t lie in the story it tells, which, in its essentials, is quite simple: The book recounts certain events, most of them not in the least extraordinary, that occur in Dublin on June 16, 1904. What does make Ulysses more difficult than most novels is the manner of its telling. The stylistic richness and bravura of Ulysses are both daunting and exhilarating, often in the same line. The concentration of Joyce’s powers makes each passage a treasure to be excavated, each page its own Troy. Beneath all the complexity, Dublin remains the Muse, if not the real hero, of Joyce’s epic. No other work of literature had ever set out to replicate—and celebrate—the noise of urban life with such alertness, art, spite, and glee. Capturing the city he loved and despaired of in all its hunks and colors, grime and glory, grievances and yearnings, Joyce created a literary metropolis that hums, moans, shouts, and sings with the collective music of the human comedy. There is no other book like it.