Six Classic Books That Live Up to Their Reputation
These novels are lengthy, but they lavishly reward the time and effort you pour into them.
When I was in college, I made the mistake of telling a teacher that I was never going to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. My teacher promptly assigned it as my required reading for the term. Stubborn as I can be about such things—on the other end of the cultural spectrum, I refuse, to this day, to watch Titanic—I’ve always been an obsessively good student, so I caved immediately. It took me about nine months to get through it, and I finished, entirely by coincidence, on “Bloomsday”—June 16, the date the book takes place.
I discovered, one difficult page at a time, that Joyce’s novel isn’t merely , but also funny, raunchy, and delightfully weird. A decade later, I still remember the keen pleasure of burrowing into a story that requires that kind
