Ulysses

I haven't been keeping very good track of the books I've been reading, but thought it worth recording (for the sake of my own bad memory) that I finished Ulysses about a month ago. I had tried it once before, as required reading, got about 150 pages into it, and thought that since I could understand absolutely nothing, there was no difference between reading it and not reading it. So I gave up. This time, I kept feeling some kind of dismay at my former reading self who couldn't understand: it gets hazy, but never so much that you actually lose the general flow of what's happening, if you're paying attention. Perhaps I didn't really know how to pay attention before -- or, which seems more likely, couldn't differentiate between when I was paying attention and when I wasn't. In a sense, it's like poetry that way -- which is fitting because, although Ulysses is not written in verse, its source book, The Odyssey, is a poem. If you don't focus on the individual words, it turns into a blur around you. As an aside, this is why I've become such a convert of memorizing poetry -- when I start memorizing, I feel like I'm only then beginning to properly read.
I won't bother with any exposition on Ulysses for now, it's been done enough by people who actually know what they're talking about. I will say: somewhere in the middle I felt like I was kind of reading just to get to the end, but around the second to last chapter I started to get a feeling from it, like there was a general wavy, whelming ambiance that I was finally getting. It had to build up sufficiently before I started to feel it, but then I felt it backwards through the book, redeeming the middle parts. Then it feels big and real, and worthwhile.