My Reading Year - 2025

"At my back I always hear, Time's winged chariot drawing near."

Books, books, and more books. Retired, yet not enough time. In "Mort", Terry Pratchet's zany take on the life of the Devil's apprentice, there is a giant room in the Devil's house full of egg-timers, one for each person on Earth and each hissing away as the sands of time for every life run out. How much time do I have left? What books must be read before the grim reaper pays a call? This year it had to be ULYSSES by James Joyce. If not now, when?

I prepared for this assault on one of the Everests of literature by reading, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, and Dubliners, both of which I enjoyed. But Ulysses is another kettle of fish. I did some research and watched some YouTube videos, but the best decision was to buy a guide to Ulysses by Patrick Hastings. He writes: "Lots of stuff is going to fly over your head - let it." It did, so I did.

Ulysses is partly based on Homer's Odyssey, the story of the Greek hero Odysseus as he journeys home from the Trojan war, a journey that takes 10 years. In Joyce's Ulysses, the unheroic Leopold Bloom journeys round Dublin in a single day. Odysseus's wife, Penelope waits faithfully for her husband; Molly Bloom entertains her lover. I enjoyed the challenge; it was a good read - some sections I skimmed, others I loved.

Having read Ulysses the next goal had to be The Odyssey itself. I bought a new, widely praised translation by Emily Wilson in which she matches Homer line for line. "I must admit when I heard we were reviewing The Odyssey, I thought 'Oh no, it's going to be wordy and dull'...but it wasn't, it really felt fresh and alive and exciting." -- Sophie Hannah, BBC Radio 4, Saturday Review.

It was good to connect with an ancient text from the 8th Century BCE that has influenced story-telling every since, and piece together half-remembered legends from childhood. Then there were the inter-locking myths of a myriad of Greek gods added to the mix. The poor weak human beings in these tales are simply pawns in an endless game of cosmic chess. As Thomas Hardy writes in the closing lines in Tess of the d'Urbervilles:

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess."

Following the dive into Greek myths, came another dive via a book group choice, into the oldest known written story, the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Summerian civilisation of 1800 BCE. It was written on clay tablets in Cuneiform script and discovered in the ruins of Ninevah in the early 19th Century. Another interesting read with links to the biblical story of Noah and the flood.

A final foray into the world of legend was Roger Lancelon Green's account of the Arthurian legends. More stories half remembered - the Sword in The Stone, the Knights of The Round Table, the Quest for the Holy Grail, Merlin and Mordred, and the death of Arthur.

We humans have always loved a good story. We have created, myths and legends, gods and godesses, heroes and heroines, noble quests and dastardly deeds. We have told stories, sung songs and recited sagas round the fire in huts and halls, crofts and castles, pubs and palaces, and still do.

Two of our book group choices directly referenced myth and legend, but then I realised they all did in different ways. To understand ourselves and give meaning to our existence we turn away from stark, cold facts and feed our minds with endless stories. As Jeanette Winterson writes in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit:

If you read yourself as fiction,

It’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”