I’ve only read 12: To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, War and Peace, The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Heart of Darkness, A Confederacy of Dunces, Hamlet, and Les Miserables.
A long time ago, I made it about two thirds of the way through Ulysses twice. It was a struggle for me to get myself broken in to his style, and at around the two-thirds mark he seemed to depart from it drastically. I felt cheated. The first time I read it I was drunk, and at around two thirds I threw the book against the wall of my apartment. The second time I was sober, and when I reached two thirds, it was the middle of the night, and I left my apartment with it, walked over to the university library, and deposited it in the slot that exists for such purposes.
This is all I remember of Ulysses:
–someone saying, “There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom”;
–the phrase, “the ineluctable modality of the visible”;
–the phrase, “kiss my royal Irish arse”;
–Bloom punctuating with farts his (presumably silent) reading (or recital) of Robert Emmet’s last words;
–Bloom fantasizing about having sex with a woman on the hood of a car;
–something about Bloom examining the buttocks of a statue to see if it had an anus;
–Bloom enjoying the hint of urine in grilled kidney.
Maybe I’ll make a third attempt to read Ulysses before I die.