I finished James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in the second week of the Christmas vacation. The final ‘Yes’ of the novel’s close seemed to inadvertently express both an ecstasy of achievement and relief at having completed one of literature’s “Big Guns”. This relief was guilt-addled – what heresy for an English student to experience euphoria at a book’s ending! – yet it is one I, and many others I’m sure, have felt before at the close of a long text. Though I was Ahab-happy to tackle Joyce’s leviathan in my spare time many others whom I have spoken to of reading Ulysses express nought but terror at the prospect. All this begs the question: why do we relate reading big books with a kind of labour and why do we fear this supposed slog?

Whether it is War and Peace, Proust or the entire Mills and Boon back-catalogue, reading bulky material is chagrin for anyone. Ulysses is Joyce’s 700 page modernist masterpiece which charts Celtic everyman Leopold Bloom through a day in “dear, dirty Dublin” underpinning it with the structure of Homer’s Odyssey. It is one example of the many epic-proportioned reads in the canon. Yet though there are issues that would prevent most ploughing through in a matter of months, it is my belief that doing so is easier than envisaged.

One obvious issue is time; most are too busy to wile away their days with a fireside read of biblical length. However, I read most of Ulysses during Michaelmas term, finding chinks of time to peruse another section. As I am no prodigy it is puzzling why more do not try a similar routine.

Another cop-out is theorising on the modern attention span. We blame televisual immediacy and ready-made-meal culture for contemporary distaste of sustained engagement, yet all TV is not bite-sized. Our sets are saturated with lengthy dramas such as Lost and The Wire; reading in instalments and weekly viewing are more similar than most would believe.

There is the problem of understanding, of attempting to gauge some “meaning” from the book in hand. Ulysses is complex; there are innumerable critical appendages. The work itself abounds in Joycean coinages, stuttering interior monologues, literary puns and formal pastiche. So misunderstood in its own time that it became the subject of pan-global bannings, the last being lifted in Ireland where it is set. Even Virginia Woolf hated it on first reading – what hope is there for us plebs?

I know nothing of what the book means and refuse to clog this hallowed rag with any sham dribblings about it. I can only describe how it altered my daily perception where, after a page or two, my mind became focused on the minutiae of crumbs and toilet handles that had before seemed insignificant. The book bridged the chasm between literary abstraction and the real world, highlighting the poetic meaning found in routine. This is the reason why if you plan to read any long book you should pick Ulysses. It should not become a means to an end, but I can unblushingly state that its effects permeate my thoughts most days. People should not be scared of reading it, but be terrified at the prospect of not having read it.