Ulysses

Almost nothing "happens" in the way plots usually promise, and that is rather the point. A funeral carriage rolls through the streets. A pork kidney burns on the stove. A library fills with clever men arguing about whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as a father grieving his own dead son. Bloom canvasses for advertisements, dodges a rendezvous he would rather not think about, and carries his tenderness and his private hurts through pubs and shops and along the strand.

What makes the book itself so alive is that the reader lives inside these heads: the thoughts as they actually arrive, half-finished, funny, learned, wounded. Bloom is an ordinary man treated with extraordinary sympathy, holding to the plain conviction that love, and not "force, hatred, history," is what really makes a life. Molly waits at the far end of the day, a singer whose sleepless flood of memory closes the book.

It asks for patience, and it rewards it fully. Few books have paid such close, forgiving attention to what it is to be a person walking through a city on a day that seems, at first, like nothing at all.