Thanks very much, Margaret! I guess I was good at teaching Ulysses because I was so passionate about it (well, that's what my students said to my boss, anyway). :-) Ulysses was the book that changed my life and put me on the road to..... equilibrium? acceptance? a deep and abiding love of life? All of those things and more. I first read it as part of a 12-week course: one teacher, three students, meeting every week to take it apart and share our experiences of it. That's the way to 'read' a book like this: it's an adventure, not just a good read.
I suppose this syntopic approach would work for all the really BIG novels that you know you should read, but you never managed to get round to. For me that would be:
War and Peace
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
The Brothers Karamazov
Tom Jones
Les Miserables
Bleak House
David Copperfield
Remembrance of Things Past
They're all classics that have had scores of critical studies written about them, so there's no shortage of books there to 'read around' them.
ulysses. UK.
