Reading calluses It was a long travel. Yesterday, November 5th, after about five months, I finished James Joyce’s Ulysses. I think I had never read anything as strenuous as this in Portuguese, let alone in English. I remember Eco’s (not so original, but still) metaphor of entering a novel like when we hike or climb a mountain and we have to learn how to adjust our respiration: establishing pace. And I took so long to follow Joyce’s rhythm. Maybe just at the sixth (!) episode I felt that I was following adequately the way that Bloom’s thoughts mend with the narrator’s voice. Of course, I bet that some would blame me for that. I started with Joyce in a “wrong way” that is, not reading Dubliners nor A Portrait before. But I was anxious to discover this book that just like Schubert said about Beethoven, writers thought “what is left for us to do?”. However, I couldn’t do it by myself. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about whether reading it with the help of guides or not. Many people advocated a pure impression of the work that is not biased by scholars’ interpretations. I guess I could’ve done that, but it would mean ignoring big chunks of text. But I wonder how many people genuinely understood what was going on in chapters like “Oxen of the sun” without help, especially if you’re reading it in English and not being a native speaker. And I don’t mean the obscure philosophical or scientific references. I remember reading a whole paragraph of that episode (that I took about 1 hour to read 2 pages of it per night!) and having a small general idea of what was going on, but when I looked at the description of it in one guide, it said something I didn’t see at all. “What? That was written here somewhere? That can’t be right” was the usual exclamation throughout the reading of that part of the book. My biggest companion wasn’t Ulysses Anotated or Blamires’ guide, but an English dictionary. I should’ve written down every word that I didn’t know on a paper and build this monumental vocabulary archive. I don’t think it is the most stimulating work that I’ve ever read, but it sure is the one that amazed me the most so far! Yet, I felt like writing so many things as I read it. As I decided to only write something about it when I had finished it, I filled some of my friends ears talking about this strange book they didn’t get what was so interesting about a day in the life of a canvasser. Seems that little they know about how much can fit in a day of our lives!