Collect your best Joycean pal and set out for a day to walk the town, paying homage to the master first:

Notice his bottle of Bushmill’s although it’s around 8 am. We’ll need it for our long day.

The novel begins at the seaside Martello Tower, with “warm sunshine merrying over the sea,” where Stephen Dedalus is renting a room and where “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” takes an early-morning dip off the cliffs into the snotgreen scrotumtightening sea:

On Bloomsday, the die-hards actually took the dive as well. I demurred.

At the seaside near the tower, you can start the day instead with your Bloomsday breakfast, and note how evident the restaurant’s delight in “Joyspeke”:

Our introductory detail to Leopold Bloom in the book is that he “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” They seem to have gone (only slightly) easier on the organs for this replica, but here’s what that breakfast looked like:

As you move through the town and the day, various Irish actors take turns reading from the 800-page work at the appropriate hour and location:

There’s a funeral for poor Paddy Dignam at eleven:

and again, people turn out in costume to read. The man reading here is actually Joyce’s nephew, who led a walking tour, and since Paddy Dignam doesn’t really have a stone in this cemetery (being fictional and all), Joyce’s brother Stannie’s grave had to stand in.

After the funeral it’s time for lunch where Leopold Bloom ate:

The bar is proud, of course, and the menu quotes the novel: “Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched shirt-sleeves, cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herrings blush. . . . Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there.”

This town buys in. Everyone dresses up 1904ishly:

You stop by the hotel pub where two barmaids are described as the Odyssean sirens, and the entire chapter is structured following the complex forms and movements of a musical composition:

Later, out at Sandymount Strand, Bloom ogles a delusional young romantic as she dreamily flashes him her dainty unmentionables from a rock next to the beach. My own were thankfully covered by my leggings (hey, it’s 1991), but I couldn’t resist:

At various hours of the day, following Leopold Bloom’s wanderings will also lead you to the National Library, the hospital where a woman is having a baby (not replicated for the tour), a cabman’s shelter, a couple other pubs, the Freeman’s Journal office, the post office . . . daily landmarks in a regular town, as you follow what Virginia Woolf called “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.”

The day ends at Bloom’s house where he brings home the young artist Stephen Dedalus and fixes him cocoa, but since someone lives there now, you can’t go in:

There’s far too much to say about the workings of this novel to be able to even begin here; rather, what interests me most about the celebration of this day is the way the citizens of Dublin feel it and live it. Yes, there are silly university scholars coming in from all over to hear academic lectures (for example, Anthony Burgess spoke on Joyce at Trinity College on the night before Bloomsday the first time I went, and it was a packed house of people getting in the mood for the big day). The real feeling of this day, though, is the way the people of the town own it. Many of the people I met on my Bloomsday adventures were not university educated; indeed, most of them had read only parts of the novel and confessed (like almost every reader if she’s honest) to not understanding big chunks of it. But the glorying in locale and in the beauty of the writing, their fondness for their favorite sections and the delight in their own “dear dirty Dublin” touched them all, barmen and cabmen and professors alike, and they were eager to lay claim to the text and its characters as their own story.

Of course, literary tourism is not unknown in the United States–I recently visited Salem with several of you, for example, and they’re all up in the Custom-Hizzy and the House of Seven Gables–but it doesn’t feel quite as deeply a part of the local identity as this particular fervor does in Dublin. Don’t you wish we lived in a country that honored artists on its currency?

Like so many Dubliners and readers everywhere, I’ve been moved by this man for all of my adult life, and I look forward to our continuing relationship. Happy Bloomsday!

So, you get this link instead! Better Book Titles. Some of these made me laugh out loud. A few favorites:

This is a literary crew… whatta ya got, people? Any additions to the ouevre?

But, generally, we created our own pool of teen fiction and filled it with delectable trash.   We rebelled against good literature, because we were hungry for sex and sexual identity.  We sought knowledge, titillation, and sin in bonkbusters, romances, and horror.

All normal for our teen development, except I’m horrified that my formative sources for understanding adult sexual relationships and female identity came from a combination of The Thorn Birds, Flowers in the Attic, and Bella.  Oh, and my parent’s divorce.

A couple of years ago I found a copy of Bella by Jilly Cooper in a secondhand bookstore and couldn’t resist re-reading it.  It’s a horrible, but concise guide on how to behave with men.  One should be seductive, emotionally volatile, and highly tragic until that dangerous swarthy man carries you off to his cave and takes you for his own.  I’ve got a couple of those things down pat.

Some friends gave me a special gift this year and I finally found the courage/gave in to the desire to read the tome they handed me…V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic and Petals on the Wind.

The books were published in 1979 and 1980 and sold a gazillion copies.   If you weren’t a teenager at the time you probably had no good reason to read them.  They are a ghoulish blend of incest, abuse, religious zeal, money, beauty, and grandeur.  Half-uncle and half-niece marry, have four kids, hide identity from world.  All is well until half-uncle/husband dies in car accident.  Half-niece/wife needs rich and religious father to forgive her and must therefore hide devil’s spawn in the attic.  For three years.  And try to kill them with poisoned donuts.  You know there’s something wrong when the character you root for is the sweet doctor brother who just wants to settle down in a loving adult relationship with his sister.

The story is told through the narration of Cathy, said sister, who is justifiably bitter and twisted and in the second book, post-attic escape, lives through the deaths of three husbands/lovers.  No drama is spared.  But one of my favorite moments in the first book is when the half-niece/mother Corrine Dollenganger explains her incestuous relationship with their father to future sibling-lovers Cathy and Christopher.

People make the rules of society, not God.  In some parts of the world closer relatives marry and produce children, and it is considered perfectly all right, thought I’m not going to try and justify what we did for we do have to abide by the laws of our own society.  That society believes closely related men and women should not marry, for if they do, they can produce children who are mentally or physically less than perfect.  But who is perfect?

Who indeed?  Well, certainly not me after learning everything about adult sexuality from Virginia Andrews, Jilly Cooper, and Colleen McCullough.  Stephanie Meyers is looking quite enlightened.

It’s the story of a young African-American woman who died in 1951, but whose cells were cultivated, stored and eventually shipped all over the world – and into outer space – because they had a remarkable ability to replicate and survive in testing environments. Her family didn’t know any of this was happening until years later, when they learned that their mothers’ cells were being bought and sold, creating fortunes for private companies, while they – the family – couldn’t even afford health care.

Rebecca Skloot weaves together multiple tales, exploring the history of medical experimentation on minority groups, skillfully explaining scientific principles and drawing an incredibly vivid portrait of Henrietta Lacks’ colorful family. I loved watching how she gained the trust of people who had no reason to trust her, and how she found her own life being transformed by knowing them.

I’m writing this quickly, so I’m not really doing the book justice here. But if you’ve seen this book around and had any curiosity at all about it: read it. I read it as slowly as possible, savoring the storytelling for as long as I could. You won’t regret the time you spend on it. Also, Skloot has put up an extensive website with photos, videos and other backstory info; that’s worth checking out too.