Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written. If Finnegan's Wake is Joyce's magnum opus, this book is no less significant and vastly more accessible. Not that it's an easy read, by any means. It will challenge you at every turn, and it's mysteries and arcana are seeminly endless and endlessly diverting for those who take great pleasure in pursuing words. A purposeful schematic architecture -- the wanderings of Ulysses - overlays the story of the very mundane and recongnizable psychological troubles of two wandering souls on June 16, 1904: Dark, melancholy Stephen Daedalus, the brilliant artist, the recent death of whose mother has left him an emotional cripple and Leopold Bloom, neurotic, middling and bodily oriented, who walks around Dublin on this particular day with the knowledge that his wife has picked the day to have an affair with rakish Blazes Boylan. The melding of the mythic and the quotidian which suffuses every word of Ulysses is the most poignant message. Our daily lives, however ineffectual, are filled with magic and mystery and myth with every breath.

The language in Ulysses is lush and the stylistic experiments never seem out of place or haphazard, though they are grandiose and arrogant in the extreme. The truth is that there is a great and touching story at work here and everything is in its service. I've read this book once a year for almost 10 years now and though I love the new discoveries that are always made upon revisitation of this text, for me it's the quiet moments that say the most. The moments when troubled, navel-gazing Stephen Daedalus and worldly but impotent Leopold Bloom are most exposed. This book lives and breaths...it's funny, irreverant, clever and touching and it's revolutions in narrative style paved the way for every single book that's been written since it's publication. Like I said, it's the best novel ever written.