HAPPY BLOOMSDAY

Dubliners take Joyce's Ulysses as it is, and on this day, read it aloud, on the street, cover to cover. Outsiders are less kind. From the New York Times Dr. Joseph Collins, May 28, 1922, a sampling:

SAJ’s Cherished Copy. There Is Also One Much Written In

He seeks to tell the world of the people that he has encountered in the forty years of sentient existence; to describe their conduct and speech and to analyze their motives, and to relate the effect the “world,” sordid, turbulent, disorderly, with mephitic atmosphere engendered by alcohol and the dominant ecclesiasticism of his country, had upon him, an emotional Celt, an egocentric genius, whose chief diversion and keenest pleasure is self-analysis and whose lifelong important occupation has been keeping a notebook in which has been recorded incident encountered and speech heard with photographic accuracy and Boswellian fidelity...

Moreover, he is determined to tell it in a new way. Not in straightforward, narrative fashion, with a certain sequentiality of idea, fact, occurrence, in sentence, phrase and paragraph that is comprehensible to a person of education and culture, but in parodies of classic prose and current slang, in perversions of sacred literature, in carefully metered prose with studied incoherence, in symbols so occult and mystic that only the initiated and profoundly versed can understand — in short, by means of every trick and illusion that a master artificer, or even magician, can play with the English language...

I wish to characterize it. “Ulysses” is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that “Gargantua and Pantagruel” immortalized Rabelais, and “The Brothers Karamazov” Dostoyevsky. It is likely that there is no one writing English today that could parallel Mr. Joyce’s feat, and it is also likely that few would care to do it were they capable. [And the reviewer goes on to note Joyce uses words "which are base, vulgar, vicious and depraved."]...

I venture a prophecy: Not ten men or women out of a hundred can read “Ulysses” through, and of the 10 who succeed in doing so, five of them will do it as a tour de force. I am probably the only person, aside from the author, that has ever read it twice from beginning to end. I have learned more psychology and psychiatry from it than I did in 10 years at the Neurological Institute. There are other angles at which “Ulysses” can be viewed profitably, but they are not many. — Dr. Joseph Collins

In other words, it's a fun beach read