Earlier this year I was required to re-read a number of books. Re-reading isn’t something I tend to do because I always have a shelf-bending number of unread books awaiting me and, well, life and eyesight is finite. This time I needed to revisit some Modernist texts for a unit I was teaching at a local university. I was unprepared for the subsequent outbreak of nostalgia, triggered by the memories of studying Modernism as a wide-eyed twenty year old. The joy of these recollections was tempered by a more elegiac mood in which I mourned the demise of the expansive liberal arts degree I had enjoyed in the 1980s, a time when an English unit was allocated an entire year, instead of the paltry thirteen weeks it is now.

I grumbled about this phenomenon to the students, many of whom seemed quite happy to be done with Modernism in a mere semester. Undeterred, I exhorted them to read the two (yes, only two) novels set for the course—and to continue beyond this. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway they confidently took to, and most of them enjoyed the book. At the same time, I implored them to read the other novel, James Joyce’s rather heftier Ulysses, a prospect at which many of them baulked. As an attempt to engage them with a shared tale of reading in travail, I related my own experience of reading the novel for the first time. This took place in a wheat sampling hut at a grain receival facility at the tiny town of Doodlakine, two and a half hours east of Perth. Perched several meters above the ground in a tin hut during skin-withering heat, I worked my way through Ulysses over several weeks. My literary wanderings through Dublin were necessarily interrupted by the sampling, weighing and measuring of wheat, all the while trying to avoid dehydration and heat stroke. I like to think of it as a doubly impressive feat of endurance. (For the record, I don’t think my ploy worked. Only a tiny percentage of the students finished Ulysses.)