Some books don't get easier. You get more patient.
Night one — "Telemachus"
The opening still feels like walking into a play three minutes after curtain. Buck Mulligan, the shaving bowl, the sea "snotgreen." I used to want every line to do work. This time I let the language wash past me the way I'd let a song play in another room.
Night two — "Calypso"
Bloom in the kitchen, eating breakfast, thinking about his cat. I'd somehow forgotten that the most famous "difficult" novel of the century has, near the start, a man feeding a cat with care. The whole book is here, in miniature: domesticity, attention, small kindnesses.
Night three — "Lestrygonians"
Hungry chapter. Joyce writes hunger so well that I had to put the book down and make toast at eleven at night. There's a long stretch about a butcher's window that I read three times because I couldn't tell if I was admiring it or just hungry.
Night four — "Sirens"
And then the prose tilts. The overture, the strange lyrical scaffolding — the chapter Joyce called a fuga per canonem. I gave up trying to follow the structure and just listened. Sometimes a book asks you to be an audience, not a reader. This was one of those chapters.
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
— James Joyce, "Nestor"