(Re)Reading Ulysses

September 18, 2008

Monday morning I Twittered that I was digging into Ulysses, a book I read once and too-quickly many years ago, and before I knew it a few friends were joining in. We have formed some kind of rule-free, schedule-less reading group I’ve dubbed The Club of Uncertain Genius. I’m excited to have company and plan to blog my thoughts on the book as a few others are.

I’ve been planning the storming of Ulysses for a while, spending some time re-reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, The Odyssey and a passel of Yeats’ poetry as part of my preparation. I was going to read Hamlet again too, but was derailed by the stunning news of David Foster Wallace’s death. I’m still not ready to say anything more about that tragedy directly, but it did spur me a bit… what better way to honor my favorite writer than to dive into a lengthy, revolutionary novel full of allusion and literary pyrotechnics?

Incidentally, in a fortifying coincidence, I was reading an article about Wallace in The News-Gazette (where news of his death is filed as a "local" story) and saw this tonight:

Sally Foster Wallace remembers how she and her son would rise at 5 a.m. each day to read a chapter of "Ulysses" together.

"He was dazzling," she said.

Indeed.

Tags: david foster wallace, dfw, james joyce, reading, ulysses