Do you celebrate Bloomsday on June 16?
June 16, 1904, is the day on which Leopold Bloom – hence Bloomsday – walks around Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
(If you have already read Ulysses and already celebrate, you may enjoy my tips & tricks for drinking in Ulysses.)
The history of this post, which will attempt to convince you to read Ulysses, goes back more than a decade:
I ended up, by accident, at a Bloomsday festival at Mike & Molly’s beergarden in Champaign where people who apparently had read Ulysses and appeared to like it were taking turns reading it from a stage. The book’s language was tedious, and I honestly remember joking to my friend (a detail I left out of the intro to my thesis defense), “Well…I never need to read that book.”