I still have my over-derelict copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’  from the last year of high-school, called grammar school in the grim Merseyside of the 1960s.

My reading then as ever, had no advice, no guidance. I read what I found curious. I had just finished two readings Lawrence Durrell’s Black Book of mysterious provenance, with much curiosity and excitement, and discovered  Ulysses soon after: where? How?

That book took me an age to finish, because I found my ability to read had slowed to a conscientious crawl, re-scanning almost every sentence with avid interest, then galloping whole tracts with exhilarating abandon.

To my surprise, I found the hero to be a Jewish resident of Dublin, born and bred. There were peripheral heroic-characters appearing everywhere, but Leopold Bloom was, is, the the hinge on which the story hangs, along with his live-in love, Molly, a flamboyant singer of opera, uncouth, sexually prolific, but with talent, tutored by the erudite Leopold in pronunciation.  Two opposites, living in punctuated harmony. Molly finishes the book with an immense, very personal monologue.

But if my synopsis is found wanting, that is but a tiny fraction of the story; a mad ramble through the hearts, minds, and real places of Dublin during twenty-four hours, guided, or miss-guided by every thought and conversation of each character.

Revelations come with every re-reading. Once is pathetic; most inferences will be missed, or misunderstood. Every consecutive reading will reveal more. Every reading will bring the joy of realization previously missed. I was primed for this effect somewhat by Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet with its four books of parallel life-stories, but Ulysses is in another category. It is a journey through exotic paths, each turn with too much detail to absorb in one trip, or a dozen. Try it!

Since then my reading has been strictly informative; Stephen Jay Gould, Tim Low, Steve Jones, Jared Diamond, Tim Flannery, Simon Winchester. The shelves sag under their weight, but battered Ulysses is always within reach

As a very young man I treasured the mine of story-telling. Every year or so I’d start again at the martello tower. I must have read the book, what, seven, eight times, the last a few years ago. Now at 78, I’ll start again. See what I missed.