Ulysses

It is the story of a man walking around Dublin for a day. He eats a kidney for breakfast. He goes to a funeral. He buys soap. He thinks about his wife. Then he goes to bed. That is the entire plot. Everything else you have heard about this novel—its difficulty, its genius, its obscenity, its unreadability—is about the way James Joyce chose to tell that story. He told it in eighteen episodes, each written in a different style, each mapped onto Homer's Odyssey. The novel was serialized, seized by the U.S. Post Office, burned, and banned for obscenity. He also wrote one of the funniest, most humane, most alive books in the English language. That part tends to get lost in the reputation. Read it for Leopold Bloom: kind, curious, wounded, funny, ordinary, and quietly heroic. The professors will handle the puzzles. Bloom is yours. A Raven's Gate Classics edition.