The Year of the Tome

So, because this has been a day, nay a week, full of lots of things that I am wholly not very good at, I'm going to tell you about something that I am wholly good at. I can read. I can read and read and read until I'm.... I'll not try a Just William pun. (The link is to a seemingly very interesting blog post on the passive aggressive in things feminist. It's there for me to come back to!) Maybe you didn't spend your childhood watching William and Violet.


This year being a very big birthday year for me, I decided that I would do some serious reading. So serious that only tomes would suffice for this weighty year. Twice hitherto had I embarked on the odyssey of Ulysses and twice had got not very far at all. Thrice now have I started it, and Reader, I am nearly there!

I bought my copy of Joyce's epic in Dublin a long, long time ago. I'd gone down with my mother for a day's shopping and sightseeing. We went by bus in those picturesque days before the motorway strode cleanly between the two cities, and you stopped in Drogheda to change buses, Northern Irish to Irish, and to race to the loo. I wasn't even married then, I think. I bought it in a bookshop in St Stephen's Green shopping centre and carried it proudly around with me and my fine literary intentions.


Years later we were all four of us on the hop on hop off tour bus round Dublin, somewhere between Dublin Zoo and the Guinness Storehouse probably, as best reflects our various interests. The garrulous tour guide was on the subject of Joyce and the tome and asked if anyone had read it. Prince Charming felt the need to tell everyone that his wife was reading it. Thankfully not that she had been reading it for nearly two decades. I can tell you that he, the husband, still tells that story. I'm sure Garrulous TG does not.


Reader, I am nearly there and you shall hear all about it. I shall be a veritable garrulous tome tour guide myself. I bet you can hardly wait.

As my pragmatic and very holy friend K recently pointed out: I've nearly finished Joyce but I'm very behind with my Bible. Back in January I also embarked on a chronological reading of the Bible. In fifty years I've read it only twice before from cover to cover- and only now do I notice that I'll have started reading both tomes in their entirety twice before this year's project.


I would highly recommend the chronological sequence. It means that you read the whole of Job shortly into Genesis. What a time that was at the start of this year. By the end I too could only put my hand over my mouth and marvel. It was a much needed read.


Let me not deflect your attention from my being very behind- maybe I'm not as good at reading as I profess. Or rather maybe I'm not as good as giving God His place as all that Outside Tea in Lent set out to achieve. But as the Message says in Matthew 11, I am trying to find the "unforced rhythms of grace", so have given myself the year of being 50 as well as 1968 2018 itself to finish this voyage. That gives me another nine months of grace!


The rule I set myself on the Joyce front was that I wasn't allowed to read any other books until Ulysses was done. There have been two short slips, but I am lining up a pile, physical and metaphorical, of books into which I intend to plunge voraciously soon, oh so tantalisingly soon. Gretchen Joanna reminded me today of Kierkegaard. He's going on the pile too. All other suggestions most gratefully, joyfully and excitedly received- but please don't let any of them be tomes!