Ten Books Everyone Should Read

Though much of the book is difficult to understand, readers will relate profoundly to its struggling but surviving ordinary heroes, Leopold and Molly Bloom.

A plot and characters based on Homer’s Odyssey; countless allusions to Hamlet, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Aristotle’s philosophy, Catholic rituals, and medieval heretics; an interior-monologue technique that presents the main characters’ fragmentary thoughts as if a tape recorder were recording them: no wonder James Joyce’s Ulysses has been called an “unread masterpiece.” Joyce’s novel is indelibly recognized within our culture – Bloomsday, the name given to June 16, the day on which the story takes place in 1904, is even in the Oxford English Dictionary. But the book is also often considered too imposing for readers to start or complete.

Why, then, bother to read Ulysses? Well, it’s a marvel of writing. The Irish Joyce could seemingly do anything with the English language, and he wrote some incredibly beautiful and astonishing words and sentences. Ulysses is also a compendium of ways to tell a story, as Joyce uses a different technique for each chapter in its second half. And parts of Ulysses are extremely funny and even almost pornographic.

Most important, though, are the characters. The 38-year-old family man Leopold Bloom, his 33-year-old wife Molly, and the struggling 22-year-old would-be poet Stephen Dedalus – two characters approaching middle age and one beginning his adult life – try to make their way in a modern world and face such problems as earning money, adjusting to aging, struggling with sexual frustration, starting a career in a hostile environment, dealing with deaths in the family, and responding to anti-Semitism.

Joyce rejects easy solutions. Many minor characters, and Stephen too, drink themselves into oblivion. After years of incomplete sexual intercourse, Molly takes a lover on this day, but Leopold responds to his sexual frustration by conducting a flirtation-by-letter and accepting Molly’s infidelity. Leopold faces one obstacle and setback after another but remains resilient, neither glossing over problems nor pitying himself or feeling defeated. As he accepts, even welcomes, his mixed happy-sad life, Leopold stands as a powerful image of how to live in the modern world, one that – even over a hundred years after the day on which Ulysses’s events occur and almost 90 years after it was published – still seems surprisingly close to our own.

I first read Ulysses in an undergraduate university course when I was 19. I had recently changed my major from math to English, and my reading of Ulysses cemented my still-shaky decision. After rereading, teaching, and writing about Ulysses in the 45 years since then, I am still tying to figure out why this book appealed to me so instantly and with a force unlike any other work of art I’ve encountered. Despite all its impediments to understanding (there is still much that I don’t understand), Ulysses for me always comes down to Leopold and Molly Bloom, those struggling but surviving, very decent, ordinary extraordinary characters living their everyday heroic lives. Whenever I meet them, they speak to me in profoundly meaningful ways and remind me why art is so vitally important.