Thank you!
Eighty days of reading did not happen on its own. Over the coming days we'll say thank you properly, a little at a time, and everything said will stay here.
The guest speakers
Across twelve Wednesdays, some of the leading voices on Joyce, on Ulysses, on Ireland and its literature gave us an evening each. Scholars and editors who have shaped how this book is read and annotated, the keeper of Joyce's Dublin, a former ambassador, a playwright, the author of the guide many of us kept open beside the text. They came to a room of ordinary readers and gave us a lifetime's work an hour at a time. None of them had to. Every one of them turned up.
- Sam SloteAnnotation, and living with difficult books
- Robert NicholsonJoyce's Dublin, real people, and the Tower
- Matthew CampbellThe 1904 Ulysses library, the real and the fictional
- Robert SpooThe time of the story, the time of the writing
- Catherine FlynnNausicaa
- Patrick HastingsThe Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses
- Colin MurphyThe United States v. Ulysses
- Joseph ValenteCyclops
- Daragh O'ConnellDante and Joyce, the Inferno and Ulysses
- Daniel MulhallHistory, literature, and Ulysses: A Reader's Odyssey
- Clare HuttonThe women and the making of Ulysses
And thanks to the authors who were with us on the desk rather than on the screen: Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, whose Ulysses Annotated has answered readers' questions for forty years; Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner, whose Annotations took up the task again; and Patrick Hastings, whose Guide was the book many of us reached for first. Their work sat open beside ours all eighty days.
The chatstarters
Thank you to everyone who started the daily conversation and kept it going. Someone had to speak first each morning — a question, a passage, a provocation, whatever it took to get everyone going — and then stay with whatever came back. Ten people took that on, in the order they took their turn, from Telemachus through to Molly.
- Cliona O'FarrellyDublin, Ireland
- Miriam BurkeDublin, Ireland
- Teresa BrookbankSouth Carolina, USA
- Monica Albertinazzi ParkhurstBristol, England
- Paul RingoCalifornia, USA
- Linda VerstratenAmsterdam, the Netherlands
- Peter O'NeillDublin, Ireland
- Caroline MoscropEngland
- Jenny EagletonHong Kong
- Rivkah SahlinMaine, USA
And finally, our readers
You found your own way through Ulysses with us.
You read the pages. You joined a discussion or dropped into a Zoom. You listened to a podcast, responded to an email, shared a thought, followed along on Facebook — or simply traveled quietly with us.
Some were reading Ulysses for the first time. Others were returning again. Some stayed with us every day; others came and went. And some simply gave this famously challenging book a try. There was no single way to make this journey.
What mattered was that you showed up, engaged in your own way, and helped turn 80 days of reading into a community.
After our 80 days traveling through one extraordinary day in Dublin, Joyce leaves us with this thought:
“Me. And me now.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses