Why nobody makes you read Ulysses

There are certain books that follow you through life like polite but persistent relatives. They appear at school, on reading lists, in quiz shows, and in newspaper columns. They are waved around as proof that someone is “well read,” usually by people who have not opened them in decades. Animal Farm is one. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is another, a Victorian plea for sympathy toward a woman put to death for other people’s sins. Of Mice and Men turns up faithfully, generation after generation, to teach teenagers that life is unfair and dreams are fragile.

Most of us meet these books before we are old enough to shave properly or understand tax forms. We read them in classrooms that smelled of chalk and floor polish, underlined important sentences, wrote dutiful essays about symbolism, and forgot half of it by Christmas.

And then there is Ulysses.

You never met Ulysses at school. No kindly teacher hands it out in Year Ten, no exam board requires you to explain what Leopold Bloom was thinking on page 417, and no curriculum committee says, “Yes, this will be accessible to fourteen-year-olds after lunch.” It simply does not happen. The novel waits until college or university, where it ambushes students who have signed up for English Literature and suddenly discover that they are no longer reading stories so much as wrestling with the language itself. By that point, the audience has narrowed dramatically. What remains are people who genuinely like books, tolerate confusion, and are prepared to pretend they understand things in seminars, while everyone else quietly backs away.

Part of the reason Ulysses never became a school staple is historical. When it first appeared in the early 1920s, it was banned in both Britain and the United States for obscenity. Customs officials seized copies, publishers were prosecuted, and passages involving sex, bodily functions, and unfiltered thoughts were considered dangerous to public morals. For more than a decade, the book circulated semi-illegally, imported in small quantities or bought under the counter by determined readers.

It was only after a famous United States court ruling in 1933 declared the book lawful that it began to reach a wider audience. Even then, it remained something of a specialist item. In Britain, its real breakthrough came much later, when Penguin Classics published an affordable paperback edition in the 1960s. For the first time, ordinary readers could buy Ulysses in a railway station bookshop rather than from a specialist supplier. That, in my view, is when it truly took off as a cultural object rather than a forbidden curiosity.

The surprising thing about Ulysses is that, beneath all its reputation and mystique, it is about almost nothing. It follows a single ordinary day. A man attends a funeral, eats lunch, walks around Dublin, thinks about his wife, worries about money, visits a newspaper office, goes to a pub, and returns home. There are no murders, no conspiracies, no courtroom dramas, and no heroic revelations. Nobody discovers they are secretly royal. It is simply Tuesday.

James Joyce took the most ordinary possible day and decided to record it in extraordinary detail, including the parts most novelists politely skip. He writes down what people think, not just what they say. He records half-formed ideas, memories, irritations, sexual thoughts, advertising slogans, fragments of songs, childhood fears, and internal arguments about whether to buy soap. Anyone who has ever tried to concentrate in a supermarket and found their mind drifting into three unrelated topics already understands the basic method. Joyce simply refused to tidy it up.

Most novels cooperate with their readers. They introduce characters carefully, explain who is speaking, indicate when time has passed, and signal when something is important. They hold the reader’s hand discreetly while pretending not to. Ulysses does none of this. It changes style constantly. One chapter reads like a newspaper, another like a play, another like medieval theology, another like a drunken pub argument, and another like a medical textbook having a nervous collapse. Sometimes there is little punctuation. Sometimes there are no quotation marks. Sometimes the reader is dropped into a character’s thoughts without warning or explanation.

Joyce also assumes that you know everything already. Greek mythology, Irish politics, Catholic theology, Shakespeare, Edwardian advertising, popular songs of 1904, and jokes that were already old when Queen Victoria was alive are all treated as common knowledge. If you miss a reference, he does not slow down. He keeps going and you jog after him with a dictionary and growing self-doubt.

Given all this, it is reasonable to ask why the book still matters, and why it has survived a century of complaints, confusion, and abandoned bookmarks. The answer is that Joyce managed to capture something no one had quite managed before. He captured how consciousness actually feels, not as tidy paragraphs or noble reflections, but as a constant stream of memory, desire, regret, irritation, fantasy, distraction, and mental noise.

Reading Ulysses is like being allowed into someone else’s head without filters. It is uncomfortable, fascinating, occasionally very funny, and sometimes unexpectedly moving. Over time, many readers begin to recognize themselves in the mess.

The difficulty, of course, is that most of us are not studying literature. We are not being examined on narrative experimentation. We live in places like Cuenca where we do things like going for lunch on the Tranvia rather than hanging out in academic libraries. We read in armchairs, not seminar rooms, and if we read books at all we want to know whether a book will reward the time we give it. Ulysses makes no promises and offers no shortcuts. It does not care if you give up. Which is why so many intelligent, curious, well-read people have started it, but never finished it and feel faintly guilty about that fact, although they shouldn’t. It is not a moral test, but a literary mountaintop, and you are allowed to admire it from a distance without scaling the peak.

Fortunately, we no longer live in 1922 and no one today has to approach Ulysses alone, armed only with courage and caffeine, because there is now an entire ecosystem of literary sherpas, recordings, films, and explanations that turn this intimidating Everest into something approachable. Many of the best of these can be found on Bilibili, which functions as a cultural archive for people who enjoy long-form material and serious deep dives without commercial interruptions.

Useful Ulysses Resources on Bilibili

Dramatized Radio Adaptation (Ireland, 1982)
A fifty-minute dramatized broadcast, originally aired in Ireland and divided into eight parts. It brings the novel to life through voices and sound and provides one of the best introductions available.
Dartmouth University Lecture Series
A collection of lectures designed for students, explaining the structure, themes, and historical background in a clear and systematic way.
Documentary on Joyce’s Life and Work
A concise thirty-six-minute documentary covering Joyce’s career, influences, and cultural context.
1967 Film Adaptation
A two-hour screen version that takes some liberties with the plot but provides a valuable visual framework for new readers.
“100 Years of Ulysses” Documentary
A fifty-minute documentary marking the centenary of the novel and exploring its influence and reception.
Ulysses Walking Tour of Dublin
A guided tour of the novel’s locations, presented by the curator of the James Joyce Museum, showing how closely the book is tied to the physical city.

Final Thought
Ulysses is not difficult because readers are unintelligent. It is difficult because Joyce intended it to be. He was writing for the future rather than for exam boards, and he assumed that later readers would have better tools, more patience, and alternative formats. He was right.

No one has to conquer this book. It can be approached sideways, sampled, listened to while washing dishes, or explored through commentary and film. And one day, perhaps unexpectedly, a reader may find themselves reading a few pages and thinking, “Yes, I see what he was doing,” which is more than most people ever reach.

One practical point is worth adding here. All of the programmes linked above are in English, but because they are hosted on a Chinese platform, your browser interface may appear covered in Chinese characters when you first open them. This does not stop you from playing any of the linked content, and in Chrome, you can usually right-click anywhere on the page and select “Translate to English,” after which the menus and buttons become readable. On Apple computers using Safari, a small translation icon appears in the address bar and performs the same task, while on iPhones and iPads the option is found under the “AA” menu. Other modern browsers offer similar tools. In most cases, a single click is enough to turn what might look like an impenetrable page into something perfectly usable.