So it's another Bloomsday with a classic left unread

Another year and thus another Bloomsday (June 16) has gone without my reading James Joyce's Ulysses, so a neurosis central to my life continues.

I mean, this is a novel considered by many to be the 20th century's greatest literary work in English, the one that so strongly influenced Virginia Woolf and to some degree every serious writer and critic since the 1930s.

I was unnerved when at secondary school I tried to read another Joycean novel, Finnegan's Wake, and found it utterly impenetrable; so I decided to give up on the peripatetic Irishman and his stream of consciousness.

But each year since the early 1970s, I've promised myself I would make the time to read the 800-page tome, but neurosis has always intervened and I now have three copies.

One is a big, beautifully produced cased edition by the Folio Society, England's most famous publisher of fine books. Then I decided I would embark on the big read during a long air-trip that would give me a chance to ride the rhythm of Joyce's prose style and get a good grip on his peculiar semantics. So I bought a smaller Picador edition with a lengthy introduction on the history of the text.

I was all set to go to Brussels in April when I realised that it was too big for hand luggage, so didn't take it.

In September I went to London and, in preparation, bought a paperback edition by Penguin that has an introduction of, well, lxxxviii pages. I left that behind on the grounds that even that was too big, took instead Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short stories, The Dubliners, and loved them both.

Considering at least a dozen publishing houses have brought out Ulysses in English, I could keep this self-deception up for years, pretending to look for the perfect edition.

Now I've heard somewhere that the serious readers should re-read Homer's Ulysses immediately before the Joycean epic, even though the earlier tale is about an epic journey that took years, and the latter about a journey of 24 hours around Dublin on June 16, 1904 (hence Bloomsday celebrations every June 16).

So, again, not in 1998. But I may have the answer next year - a slow boat to Europe and a cruise through Homer and Joyce.

In the meantime, the two books I gained perhaps the most stimulus from in 1998 are:

The Keepsake, by expatriate New Zealander Kirsty Gunn, a brilliantly written novel on a repellent subject (trans-generational sexual abuse) that could be read as allegory or as realism. Some readers were aroused to revulsion and anger and the novel caused major divisions among critics. I couldn't get it out of my head.

The Reader, a translation from the German by Carol Brown Janeway of a novel by a judge, Bernhard Schlink, which caused the most extraordinary critical slanging match in Britain with Frederick Raphael claiming it as cheap and exploitive, and George Steiner and A S Byatt insisting on its artistic authenticity and moral validity. A great read and a chance to ponder a major moral dilemma.

All of which goes to show that the Information Age may "maketh a full man," as Francis Bacon would have put it, but literature is more likely to make people think and feel deeply and not just skate across the surface of human affairs.
- Gordon McLauchlan