#1 Ulysses, James Joyce

The #1 book on Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list is Ulysses by James Joyce. If you’ve been joining me on this journey to savor humanity’s best art, you know that I’ve been intimidated by this one. I started my “100 Best Novels” quest with Joyce’s "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (#3 on the list), and then re-read Gatsby (#2). I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I finally started Ulysses. It took me months to get through it, but I finished it! I was tempted to write this post as follows: "Ulysses: I finished it." 

I’ve been keeping a list of all the books I read since 2003. Most years, I read somewhere between 45-55 books a year. In 2021, I only read 20. THAT’S how long it took me to read. It’s a delirious dive into different styles, Dublin districts, multiple motifs, and Ireland’s dramatic history. I loved it and I spent many days swearing at it.

After I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce inspired me to do some research into Ireland and its history and I became quite engrossed in it. The quest for independence and the civil war and the Celticism and the mystique is all so heartbreaking and enchanting. I suggested to my husband, Roger, that we take a trip there and he agreed. Our trip turned out to be booked after vaccines and before the Omicron variant - our first bit of Irish luck. 

U2's beloved presence is everywhere,
here's a particular quote I loved

James Joyce based Ulysses on Homer’s Odyssey. According to scholars, each episode in Ulysses corresponds to a different adventure from the Odyssey. However, Joyce wanted to illustrate that ordinary people make heroic quests in their daily lives all the time - you don’t have to go to battle against one-eyed monsters while lost at sea. As this expert notes: 

“Ulysses is about the lives of a few people in Dublin in 1904… the experiences these people undergo, which are largely mundane, reflect the trials, tribulations, infidelities, missed opportunities, unfulfilled promises, odd coincidences, small satisfactions, and pleasant joys we all aspire to." 

This quote moves me deeply. One of my steadfast beliefs is that there is so much beauty and magic in the mundane - those parts of life we think we have to slog through quickly to get to the good part. I just have to pay attention and be present for them. I suck at this often and I bet you do, too. When I’m traveling, suddenly the mundane comes to life, simply because I’m away from home. I feel more expansive, more generous to human imperfections, including my own. And when I return home, I appreciate anew the little mundane stuff of my daily life, like my shower pressure, my favorite coffee mug, and the way the light gently peeks around my bedroom curtains in the mornings, while I am snuggled up all toasty in my own comfy bed.

Museum of Literature in Dublin

Museum of Literature in Dublin

I had given up on finishing Ulysses in the months preceding our trip to Ireland, but I resolved to try again. What could be cooler than reading it while in Dublin, visiting the very streets and shops he wrote about in the book? I started it again from the beginning and read it throughout our visit. And throughout our visit, I found “odd coincidences, small satisfactions, and pleasant joys” galore. 

On our first full day in Dublin, we enjoyed a literary walking tour through St. Stephen’s Green. Here is a picture of Roger and me with the man himself, James Joyce. 

Roger, James Joyce, and me, St. Stephen's Green

During this tour through St. Stephen's Green, we met a nice couple from Limerick. They gave us all kinds of great ideas for other parts of Ireland we might want to explore. Roger and I tend to keep our vacations very loose and unstructured so we can take advantage of random opportunities like this. With their colorful descriptions of the area, they convinced us to travel west across the island to Galway on the Atlantic coast. 

Ulysses Rare Books

While we made those arrangements, we continued our exploration of Dublin. James Joyce’s likeness and legacy are everywhere - there is even an annual celebration called Bloomsday, a commemoration of his life and work. It’s named after Leopold Bloom, one of the main characters in Ulysses. We ate lunch at Davy Byrnes, the pub where Bloom ate in Ulysses and where Joyce frequented himself. We stopped at a rare book store called Ulysses, where I gawked at shelf after shelf of first editions by writers like James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett. Roger even indulged me with a trip to the Museum of Literature of Ireland, that was full of both literary inspiration and a spacious, playful aesthetic. We did a lot of non-Ulysses sight-seeing as well. We took the Guinness and Jameson tours, road e-bikes on the Howth peninsula, explored the Cliffs of Moher, traveled the Wicklow Mountains, and saw our first live soccer match.

Joyce chilling at Temple Bar

One day we went to Merchant's Arch in Temple Bar for some shopping. We wandered into Jam Art Factory, where I found too much to love - antique book page prints, funky, clunky jewelry, and adorable ceramics. The person working there was more than happy to share my obsession with Ulysses. I rarely remember my dreams, but every night in Dublin, while reading Ulysses in every spare moment of the day, I had the most vivid dreams of my life. She told me that many people have intense dreams when they read it. It includes a lot of prose that is dreamy and hallucinatory - this is partly why it is so challenging to get through. We chatted at length about other Dublin sites and events related to the book. We confessed our mutual desire to one day finish the novels we each were writing. Our brief conversation hit so many meaningful points that, when we left, I joked to Roger that I needed to sit down for a minute to compose myself. Later that day, while enjoying lunch and live music at the famous Temple Bar, we discovered that the singer used to live an hour away from us here in Wisconsin. So much of this trip was magical.

Our weekend getaway to Galway was a huge hit. After a beautiful day of driving the countryside and exploring the oldest pubs on the island, we found ourselves at an outdoor beer garden down by the coast. [Side note: Because we were both a bit nervous about driving on the unusual side of the car and on the unusual side of the road, we helped each other out by yelling “PEDO” every time we saw a pedestrian. Yes, we are twelve.] Back to our lovely beer garden, and who should we see walking by but the couple from our very first day in Dublin! Neither one of us could remember their names, but the gent was wearing a red shirt and there was no way I was going to let this coincidence go - after all, we were only in Galway because of their kind counsel. I ran down the block yelling, “Red shirt! Red shirt!” at the top of my lungs in my obvious American accent. Thankfully, they remembered us and we were properly reintroduced - hello Dennis and Maria - and they joined us at the beer garden for a few pints and some raucous storytelling while the sun went down. Magic.

Cool 3D art, Museum of Literature in Dublin

Many people experience joy from traveling, but this particular trip, after two years of fear and worry and too much homebound captivity, illustrated not just the joy of travel, but the joy of talking to strangers - the joy of randomness, the joy of odd coincidences that can make perfect strangers bonded together, even if only for a few short minutes. I don’t mean to get too sappy about this - after all, Roger and I have a saying: “You know who I hate? Others!” (Because come on, we’ve all been there.) But what struck me most about this trip is how much we missed each other during this pandemic. We didn’t just miss those we know and love, we missed our fellow humans more broadly. It fills my heart with hope. 

Relishing all this amazing art - in the form of novels, albums, and music - has inspired me to start a Meetup group to discuss these pieces with others. I encourage you to join me at one of the upcoming online events. This project has changed my life for the better and I would love to bring more people along for this ride. Our next book is Lolita, but do check out the events for albums and movies too. Let’s inspire each other! 

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses

Roger enjoying a Guinness at the Gravity Bar overlooking the Dublin skyline

"May the roof above us never fall in, and may the friends gathered below it never fall out". -Irish toast