At last, a book about James Joyce that makes you laugh

I do not think I am alone in confessing that I had read critical works on James Joyce before I got around to reading him. As a schoolboy I drew up my own private curriculum, and one influential book was Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern World, where I first encountered Joyce; and then moved on to Anthony Burgess’s Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader. Eventually I did read the actual work. All my teachers told me Ulysses was ‘mucky’. When they said that Finnegans Wake was even muckier, it slightly fritzed my brain when I finally got a copy.

This year being the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, there has been a flurry of new books and republications: the anthology The Book About Everything; Terence Killeen’s extremely useful Ulysses Unbound; Patrick Hastings’s The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Sam Slote and Marc Mamigonian’s Annotations.