A Book Worth Knowing continues with a fifth title: James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that turns one ordinary day into one of the biggest books in the language.
Every June 16th, readers gather in Dublin, and in cities well beyond it, to walk a route through the city, stopping at a tower, a beach, a newspaper office, a graveyard, reading passages aloud as they go. The date is called Bloomsday, named for a fictional character who never actually existed, and the whole event exists because James Joyce once decided that one forgettable Thursday in 1904 deserved this much attention.
That Thursday is Ulysses. Published in 1922, it follows a single day, June 16, 1904, and turns it into one of the most ambitious novels ever written. A man eats breakfast, walks the city, attends a funeral, has an awkward run-in at a newspaper office, and eventually goes home. Nothing especially dramatic happens. Joyce spent roughly seven years making sure that didn’t matter.
An Old Journey Hidden Inside a New One
The novel follows Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, and Stephen Dedalus, a young writer, as their paths cross and separate across Dublin. Each of the eighteen chapters loosely mirrors an episode from Homer’s Odyssey, though Joyce buries the parallels rather than announcing them. Bloom wandering the city stands in for Odysseus’s ten years at sea. A newspaper office becomes a version of the cave of the winds. A late-night visit to a rough part of town becomes something like a trip to the underworld. You don’t need to know Homer to follow the story, but readers who spot the pattern get an extra layer out of it.
The bigger risk Joyce takes is stylistic. He keeps changing how the story is told, sometimes chapter to chapter, sometimes paragraph to paragraph. One chapter is a tightly controlled stream of thought. Another is written as a mock newspaper, complete with fake headlines. Another unfolds almost entirely like a play script. The final chapter, narrated by Bloom’s wife Molly, runs for pages with almost no punctuation, following her thoughts as they drift, loop back, and contradict each other, the way an unedited mind actually works.
What an Unremarkable Day Can Hold
Joyce wasn’t just describing a day. He was trying to fit an entire human interior into it: hunger, desire, grief, boredom, jealousy, and all the small, unglamorous business of getting through hours that mostly don’t matter. Bloom isn’t a hero in any traditional sense. He’s a middle-aged man worrying about his marriage, avoiding a rival, and thinking constantly, and without embarrassment, about food, his body, and the people around him. Joyce gives those unheroic thoughts the same seriousness other novelists usually save for battles and revelations.
That choice was itself an argument, that an ordinary life, examined closely enough, holds as much complexity as any epic. You can see a smaller version of the same idea now in how many people document their own ordinary days online, a whole genre built on the premise that a normal Tuesday is worth paying close attention to. Joyce made that case first, with far more ambition and far less editing.
The novel was banned in the United States and Britain for over a decade after publication, mostly over a handful of sexually frank passages, before a landmark 1933 court ruling in New York allowed it to be published, a decision that reshaped obscenity law for literature more broadly.
Its influence now shows up across writers as different as Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Salman Rushdie, all of whom borrowed some version of Joyce’s willingness to let style itself carry meaning instead of just describing it.
None of that makes Ulysses an easy read, and Joyce never meant it to be. It asks for more patience than most novels do, and pays that patience back by making one completely unremarkable day feel, by the final page, like it somehow contained everything. Which is, in its own roundabout way, why people still walk the streets of Dublin every June to retrace it.
Read Ulysses, and find out why a single day has kept readers occupied for over a hundred years.
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