Ireland — Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — and in doing so maps the entire interior of a human mind. Joyce took Homer's Odyssey and compressed ten years of wandering into eighteen hours of errands, pub visits, a funeral, and a lunch.

The first chapters are deceptively approachable. Then the book starts shapeshifting — a chapter written as a fugue, another as a play script, another as a history of English prose styles. The difficulty is real but overstated. If you stop trying to catch every allusion and let the language carry you, Ulysses is funny, dirty, tender, and deeply human.

"Joyce makes you feel what it is actually like to be alive inside a body, inside a city, inside a single ordinary extraordinary day."

Not where you start the Great Books. But it is where a certain thread of them leads.