Six months seems like a long commitment and reading this 933 page masterpiece can be a daunting prospect. There will be literary, historical and classical references you may not know (yet), but I promise you it will be worth it! Here are ten reasons why:
- Ulysses teaches you to be a better reader.
- Reading Ulysses helps you to understand your own interior thoughts and language.
- Ulysses is frighteningly pertinent to today’s climate of xenophobia and tyranny.
- Ulysses is funny.
- Ulysses features a dancing, singing bar of soap.
- Everyone who reads Ulysses finds references, allusions and images that resonate.
- Once banned for obscenity, Ulysses is up-close and personal to the body.
- The language of Ulysses can be breathtakingly beautiful: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit . . .”
- The vivid and seductive response to ignorance and injustice in Ulysses will inspire you.
- Ulysses is the story of one man, but a woman (Molly) gets the last word!
What past Ulysses readers in the Salon have said:
“I must thank you for a most wonderful study of Ulysses. I couldn’t imagine that I would actually make it through. Occasionally I felt inadequate, but always eager and always willing to reach. And what a reward in the end: to have read a brilliant novel, and to have made a connection with a group of fellow voyagers that I cannot praise enough. How fortunate we have all been. It is never really over though is it? Bloom will be with me forever, pulling me back to Dublin and the streets therein.”
“Those of us who have done Proust and Ulysses with Toby are longing for her to take us on another read . . . We all love the long read.”
For more on this join my lecture and discussion Why Read Ulysses? (Tuesday 24 November on Zoom), the cost is redeemable against our next Ulysses study starting in January 2025.
