Ulysses

Why we love it

• •A man says good morning to his cat, quite seriously, because he always answers the cat, and somehow this is one of the most famous novels ever written.
• •Joyce took the oldest adventure story there is, a hero’s ten-year voyage home, and dared to retell the whole of it as one regular man’s single day walking around Dublin.
• •Nothing enormous happens: a cake of lemon soap, a song through a window, a shared cup of cocoa, a kind word handed to a stranger who needed it. Look closely and the ordinary day turns out to be brimful.
• •The bravest thing in the book is not a battle. It is a kind man who will not walk past a lost young stranger in the dark, and instead takes his arm and sees him safely home.

Why it matters

Ulysses, published by James Joyce in 1922, is one of the most celebrated and famously difficult novels ever written, routinely named the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and one most readers are told to admire long before they are invited to enjoy it. Joyce built it on a daring idea: he took Homer’s Odyssey, the ancient story of the hero the Greeks called Odysseus and the Romans called Ulysses, and his ten-year voyage home from war, and retold it as a single ordinary day, the sixteenth of June, 1904, in the city of Dublin, following one unremarkable man named Leopold Bloom from the moment he wakes to the moment he falls asleep. The wager underneath every page is that an ordinary life, looked at closely and kindly, holds as much as any epic, and that noticing the small things, a cat, a song, a stranger’s sadness, is its own quiet kind of courage. Readers around the world still retrace Bloom’s day every year on the sixteenth of June, a day they call Bloomsday. What earns the book a place in a child’s hands is exactly that wager: long before anyone tells them it is difficult, a child can feel the wonder hidden in an ordinary day and the bravery inside an everyday kindness.