A Reader’s Guide to Not Reading Ulysses. It can happen to anyone. You’re at a birthday party, Bar Mitzvah, or PTA meeting. The day has gone well, the weather outside is perfect, you’re happy to be alive. But then the rabbi, soccer mom super hero or neighbor’s boarding school brat references James Joyce’s Ulysses. The innards of your bowels roar, your heart goes all NASCAR, a tsunami of sweat floods your brow, back and underarms. You flashback to Thanksgiving three years ago: the last time someone referenced Ulysses — you confused it with Homer’s The Odyssey. Five minutes later, the host informed you that, unfortunately, they had miscounted the table settings and you soon found yourself eating turkey at the kids table. And now the book rises again like an unread wraith into your otherwise literate life. You have two choices: confess to never having read Ulysses or toss the Hail Mary question: “Is that the one where he masturbates?” Neither choice has a happy ending. You go home alone, despondent. Food loses its taste, sex is mirthless, even an episode of Modern Family fails to elicit a chuckle. You’re not alone. Every year, millions of American’s suffer in silence for not having read the greatest novel of the 20th Century. But now there is hope. I’ve read Ulysses so you don’t have to. Your days of struggling through mile-long passages of impenetrable language and backbreaking bulk when all you really want to do is luxuriate in the grocery store prose stylings of James Patterson and Nora Roberts are over. Just follow these three simple “Ulylessons” and you will sound like a second-year Joyce Studies PhD candidate to friends, loved ones and pets (all of whom have probably also never read Ulysses). Ulylesson #1...