Hi Mom,

When you told me a few weeks ago that you wanted to read Ulysses, I kinda just laughed at you. And now we’re going to read it together and share our experience. Who's laughing now!

We can’t just start reading, however. We need to decide how we're going to read Ulysses. Do we need a refresher on Homer’s Odyssey first? Are we going to use a companion book to help us identify and understand each and every little allusion? Or shall we just dive in and experience the book au naturel?

And which book are we even going to read? The publication history of Ulysses is one of continual error—the first edition contained up to 2000 misprints, and Joyce never fully corrected a proof before his death. Every edition is ‘wrong’ in some way, even the 1984 “Critical and Synoptic” edition produced by a group of scholars. (More on that here, if you are curious. It made literature nerds big mad, and yet, it is the edition commonly used in scholarship.)

Let me know your thoughts on the following, and I’ll arrange for us to have the exact same texts.

1. Do you want to read the 1984 scholarly compilation version, or a printing based off of the 1932 Odyssey Press edition (which long held the reputation of being most accurate)?

2. Would you like a reading guide/ companion book of some kind? Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford is a common recommendation; the San Francisco Public Library has a list of more exotic options here.

Looking forward to experiencing this with you!

K.

Geez, mom! Don’t embarrass me. I’m not a little kid anymore! ;)

Your joke sort of points, though, to one of the reasons I’m interested in this shared reading experience. We both like books; we both majored in English; we both worked in education. We have a lot in common! But that’s very much mediated through our parent-child relationship—and we’ve never really overlapped in our reading habits in a way that caused us to primarily express ourselves as readers/ critics/ scholars/ enjoyers of literature.

To that end, please take a moment to introduce yourself—to me, and to our future reading audience (I wasn’t kidding about putting this online. Tell us a bit about getting your degree by correspondence while in the convent in the 60s, and your experience as a reader and a teacher. You were even a tutor in a maximum security penitentiary for a while! Give us the details, and I’ll introduce myself in my next email.

The big book of annotations to Ulysses that I ordered arrives today, and then I’ll know which version we’re reading; I need the page numbers to line up! I think I’ll skip reading the Odyssey first. It doesn’t fit into my not-retired lifestyle to add another epic on top of an epic! If you’d like to read the Odyssey, the recentish translation from Emily Wilson sounds like a very readable version if you can get your hands on it.

Looking forward to learning more about you!

K.