Pun Salad

Caveat Lector: most of this book report will be about me, not the book.

The "Final Jeopardy!" category on October 31, 2025 was "Famous Trials". And the clue was:

A lawyer in a 1933 trial called this novel "tedious and labyrinthine and bewildering"--& he was arguing on its behalf

None of the actual contestants gave the correct response. (Their guesses: Lolita; The Wizard of Oz; Catch-22.) But—hah!—at that point in my life I was about a week into "reading" Ulysses. And I shouted out my answer immediately. Impressing nobody except my cat.

This was my second attempt at climbing Mount Ulysses. My first was back in college. Professor Jenijoy La Belle (a real person, and that was her actual name) assigned it. And it was as "tedious and labyrinthine and bewildering" back in 1971 as it was in 2025. I remembered nothing about it except (1) the opening few words ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan") and (2) Leopold Bloom's love of kidneys and their "fine tang of faintly scented urine." [Beginning of Episode 4.]

I do not know how I passed that course.

The reason I tried Ulysses again: back in 2021, it appeared on the New York Times shortlist of candidates for "the best book of the past 125 years." I started a reading project to read the titles I hadn't already read. And the final one on my project list was Ulysses, since I didn't consider to have actually "read" it back then.

I had a small notion that I would email Professor La Belle when I finished the book, thank her for her grading mercy, and report that I finally got more out of the book, fifty years later.

Alas, she passed away earlier this year. And (honestly) I am pretty sure I got nothing more out of the book this time around than I did back then. Again and again, I found myself in "look at every page" mode.

The "Gabler Edition" I used runs to 644 pages of text, which I factored into 46 days of 14 pages each. I assumed (incorrectly) that I could choke down and digest 14 pages easily enough. I cheated on the final Episode though: Molly Bloom's famous stream-of-dirty-consciousness punctuation-free soliloquy; I cued up Caraid O’Brien's audio rendition on YouTube (Part One; Part Two) and followed along in the book.

That didn't help much.

I think I could have had a more successful read by seeking out the various interpreters and annotators of Joyce's work, reading those concurrently with the text.

I could not think of a good enough reason to do that, however.

I acknowledge the praise people have heaped on the book. But Goodreads encourages me to rate according to my reaction, not pretend that I'm scoring on some objective measures of quality. So, one star.