For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 and 1921, Ulysses has survived bowdlerization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-raging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kilberd says in his introduction that Ulysses is 'an endless open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.'

 
This book is on the BBC Big Read list, and one that I'm both intimidated by and looking forward to. I'm not sure I'll like it, as mum says that it's like reading an entire novel written in poetry, which might piss me off. If the beauty of the language is equal to the story I'll be a happy chappy.