When I was a junior in college, I spent the spring term studying in Dublin. One of the three courses I took (alongside an Irish Lit survey, and a course in 20th Irish history) was a semester-long reading of Ulysses. Wow. We read one chapter per meeting of the course, and boy, did we read it closely. The only other required reading was a book that contained 18 different "walking tours" of Dublin that corresponded to each of the chapters.
And I'll maintain to my dying day that there was no better way to read Ulysses than that. Our final exam was a 100-question test of stumpers. The only question I can remember, for example, was one that required us to name the four rivers that the funeral procession in chapter 5 crosses. And oh yeah, we had to put them in the correct order. If I remember correctly, I scored like a 96 on it. I couldn't replicate that score now, some 15 years or so later, but I'm still proud of it.
So, Happy Bloomsday, all.
