The copy of the book I bought at the Keele University bookshop (I was studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the time, was open to influence) has travelled with me, sat on various shelves, its spine cracking, the edges of its pages yellowing.
The book was recommended to me by Scott McCracken, by Miss Cooper, by Jeremy Fisher, by Pope Innocent III, by Sue the Librarian, and all of them in it for the literature. I took it with me to France, to Italy, to Wyle Cop, to Ceredigion, and even to Dublin itself. It weighed me down with its great reputational promises and its respectable unrespectability. I began to think it had defeated me.
What is it to be so famous and to represent a formidable pinnacle of literature, to become reading for the super-diligent? By degrees, Ulysses became a monument to a decline in concentration, to my perception that the pandemic and Facebook between them had done for my ability to read at length. What I could manage had been reduced to Guardian articles, or, on a good day, Billy Collins' poems.
In the process of finishing Ulysses I think I read the first Episode, Telemachus, five or six times. In consequence, this may be the section I'll remember second best of all. I'd go far as to say it's an Episode that I understand.
What helped jumpstart my 2021 attempt was the way my son Jonty, now also reading the book, treated it as if it were, well, just another book. He looked Ulysses in the eye, as if he were equal to it, which he is. And in doing so, he showed me that I am too. "It's really funny," he said.
What? Funny?
This was the tip I needed, and when I got far enough into the swing of it, I also laughed out loud, even guffawed at times. I skipped lightly over the parts I couldn't make head nor tail of, seeking out the plentiful, juicier moments. Soon I was halfway through, then three quarters. I could hardly believe that the end was so nearly in sight. It was as if I had started reading downhill.
What I hadn't expected, even so, was how I would be swept away at the end in a rush of supreme recognition. How is it possible that it took me so long to get to that place, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, with all its rampant recognisable humanity?
As I had also unloaded my reading troubles on Carol on our long car journey to our performances in Devon last August, I gave her the good news in November. It's done. For my birthday, she gave me the apron of the book to mark my achievement - it felt as good as any prize-giving, and although I'm wearing it at every opportunity, the apron's still clean - it's a reading apron after all.
The final reading was all done and dusted in less than a year among the bed sheets and pine cones and sometimes with the sea lapping at my feet at Fairbourne. Penelope is the most wonderful thing I've ever read because it's wonderful, and because it came like that cold beer, crisps and pie I ate all at once at the pub at the foot of Cader Idris after misreading the largescale OS map on the descent.
So yes to the book which sat on my shelf plump and teasing with its thousands upon thousands of tiny pawprint words yes the twelve years the eighteen episodes yes the rollicking kidney of Irish history fried up in memory yes the guffaws yes the blushes and the winding boredom with another mug of coffee yes the classical religious literary references assumed in hours of lying there propped up on one hand making no sense and then sense coming unravelling its freewheeling veracity all over the inside of my imagination and yes yes I will read it again Yes.
