Every so often, usually at the end of a decade or if there's some big literary anniversary coming up, someone somewhere in the world gets the bright idea of compiling one of those "Hundred Books You Must Read" lists. These are either voted for by Joe Public or some snooty bunch of literati, but they always provide interesting reading. Mainly at the ridiculousness of some of the entries (every single Harry Potter book ever written? Seriously? Thank God none of them have Twilight on them or I'd have to turn in my library card). Sometimes, however, I feel the smug glow of literary satisfaction when I realise just how many of the books on the list I've actually read; on the BBC Big Read in 2003, for example, I worked out that I've read exactly half of the books on the list, have read different books by three of the other authors on the list, and have either bought or plan to buy in order to read eight more. That's theoretically sixty-one books out of the hundred. Not bad going...
However. Ohhhhh, but however. One of these eight books which I have bought and plan to read is the one which remains the bane of my life. Not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, although I fully intend to settle down and read both War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment sometime before my death, and will go out and buy/borrow them in order to do so. No, the book which is the bane of my very existence, the one I am determined to read just because it's such a challenge but which I keep picking up and putting down again and which is on every single one of these stupid lists is Ulysses by James Joyce. And despite owning said book for almost ten years, I've never got further than the first few pages.
I bought Ulysses when I was eighteen and in Ireland for the first time. I found it in a sweet little secondhand bookshop in Dublin, decided I *must* read it (because you don't get much more Irish than James Joyce and I was - and still am - besotted with all things Irish) and bought it at once. It has sat on my book shelf ever since, occasionally being picked up and leafed through before I decide it's either too complex or that I'd rather read something else, and back on the shelf it goes. I have several books which I've picked up over the years which I've started and stopped - mainly more 'theoretical' ones like Robert Graves' "White Goddess" or James Fraser's "The Golden Bough", which require you to be in the mood to read something which resembles a text book in all but name, but bloody Ulysses haunts me. It sits on the bookshelf right next to my bed and it mocks me. I wake up some nights in a cold sweat because I think Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus are calling me, waiting to lure me to some horrible and untimely death - possibly a death which involves being beaten severely with copies of Ulysses. You may laugh, Dear Reader, but such is the substance of my dreams...
Now as I've stated previously I don't much go in for New Year's resolutions, on account of my spectacular failure to maintain them for more than a week. This year, however, I will swear a solemn and binding vow to rid myself of this monkey on my back: by the end of the year, come hell or high water, I will have read, finished and maybe even understood Ulysses. There. I said it. And put it down in black and white. It's as good as binding now. So while I have other literary needs, wants, desires and necessities this year - the Great Big Song of Ice and Fire Re-Read Project, for example, and all the books on my book club reading list - I am also going to finally plough through James Joyce's literary millstone-round-the-neck. Even if it kills me.
Look out, Ulysses, for I am coming. Eventually. I just need to to watch this very interesting spot of paint drying over here first. Hey, I never said I was going to start it as soon as I finished this blog post, did I?!!
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