In case anyone else does actually read this, I want to explain about your dozing off, Mom. Yes, you do get up early (like, early early) and you do lots of chores and errands and yard work and walks. But also you have a simply incredible ability to fall asleep to anything. You fell asleep when I put Mad Max: Fury Road on the television one night, and that movie is basically just one long action sequence. So I am fully unsurprised that you nodded off during Ulysses. I knew it would happen, and for me our inter-generational epistolary art project experience thing would not be complete without it. Can you keep track for me, mom? Rack up a tally of how many times you fall asleep while reading Ulysses? I think this is very important data for our project.

As for my reading experience: I’m torn between wanting to look up everything and wanting to just experience the flow—with also a dash of just wanting to heave the damn book across the room. As a whole, I do not like it, and yet there are moments when I love it more than anything.

I read the first episode flipping between the novel and the annotations—really looking up everything that gave me the slightest pause. (Not the martello tower—I do remember the one in Kingston!) That mostly left me with the sense of how intensely this book was laboured over. JJ seems to have chewed over every bit of his life and every bit of knowledge in his head to produce Ulysses; I almost can’t believe he ever wrote anything else, let alone the intense corpus that he produced.

Reading the annotations only tells me what something is, however; they don’t tell me what something means. I have a lot of questions, and so far the text itself isn’t giving up much in terms of broader themes. I’m jotting notes as I go for future research.

For episodes two and three, I allowed myself to simply read and make note of the things that sparked my curiosity, and then browsed the annotations after. It was almost as interesting to see what wasn’t annotated. In these episodes, I loved the words (ineluctable, grike, bladderwrack, abstrusiosities, seamorse). And there were some simply glorious phrases: "crush crackling wrack;" “good young imbecile.” There was our first reference to absinthe, and “almosting it” is definitely going to become a part of my regular lexicon.

I’m loving your stream of consciousness notes; please keep sending them! I think you’re going to read this faster than I am. 

To give you something meatier to think about and respond to, I want to draw out your thoughts on the story we’re being told in Ulysses. Each episode (they’re called episodes, not chapters—if I remember correctly, this was Joyce’s choice) roughly corresponds to Homer’s Odyssey. There is, actually, an entire schema behind the novel (of which two versions exist, because of course). Per Slote et al:

You wrote in your notes on the first episode that you are “Wondering how this will all come together.” Put that wondering together with the above quote, and let me know how you are (or are not) experiencing Ulysses as a “programmatic or systematised book.” The title of the novel clearly invites us to keep the Odyssey in mind as we read, but does it make a difference to know that fifteen of the eighteen episodes have an organ assigned to them?

K.

ps. a few resources in case it's helpful:

https://www.ulyssesguide.com/ has a good recap of the Odyssey plus cogent and detailed summaries of each episode.

https://www.joyceproject.com/ has annotations (although sadly not the best user experience).

And you might want to request this copy of Uly from the library to see if the essays are of interest: 
The Cambridge centenary Ulysses : the 1922 text with essays and notes / James Joyce ; edited by Catherine Flynn.

And this caught my eye as well:
The world broke in two : Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the year that changed literature / Bill Goldstein.

Almost forgot

In case you want to know what a "latin quarter hat" looks like.