1James Joyce's novel Ulysses follows the events of a single ordinary day in the life of Dublin.
2The novel patiently charts the wandering thoughts of its unlikely hero, an advertising salesman named Leopold Bloom.
3Joyce pioneered a revolutionary narrative technique that later came to be known as stream of consciousness.
4This ambitious method attempts to capture the mind's unedited flow of impressions, memories, and half-formed ideas.
5Thoughts collide, fragment, and dissolve into one another without any logical transitions or polite explanations for the reader.
6Bloom's buried memories of his dead infant son rise to the surface amid the most mundane errands.
7The final chapter of the novel runs for dozens of pages without a single mark of punctuation.
8Molly Bloom's closing monologue remains one of the boldest experiments in the whole history of literature.
9Many early critics angrily dismissed the novel as deliberately incomprehensible and needlessly obscure in its style.
10It was banned in several countries for decades because of its unusually frank treatment of the body.
11Today it is almost universally regarded as one of the towering landmarks of modernist fiction in English.
12Reading it demands real patience and sustained effort, yet it rewards the persistent reader extraordinarily richly.