This year I was planning to finally read\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0in its entirety in time to celebrate on 16 June. I even took it off my bookcase a couple of weeks ago and put it on my coffee table so it was staring at me. But I didn’t. I didn’t even start. So, other than the first 50 pages or so, and parts of Molly Bloom’s monologue, it remains one of those ‘cultural landmark’ books I haven’t read.<\/p>\n Though I’ve been a lifelong reader, there are plenty more. I’ve never finished the Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy, despite a couple of attempts.\u00a0Two Towers<\/em>\u00a0is just so bone-achingly dull I can’t get through it. I’ve never read Tolstoy, or Hemmingway, or Proust (though I have grand plans to tackle all three at some point in the next few years). I haven’t read Moby Dick<\/i>, or\u00a0Middlemarch<\/em>.<\/em> I plan to read those too.<\/p>\n When it comes to pop-culture, cultural capital works in two ways: you can obtain cultural capital by engaging with particular cultural icons; and you can obtain it by avoiding others. A case in point: I have seen every episode of Buffy, and I have never read\u00a050 Shades of Grey \u00a0<\/em>(I read the first couple of pages out of curiosity and found it so appallingly written I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand it). These two facts give me cultural capital in some circles, though I’m sure not in others. More problematically for some people I know, I haven’t seen a single episode of\u00a0The Sopranos<\/em>, but I have read\u00a0The Da Vinci Code<\/em>. Twice.<\/p>\n (I am trying to avoid justifying myself in this post \u00a0– ‘but I’ve read x, y, z so I’ve read lots, honest! Including some really impressive stuff!’ – but I have to explain the Dan Brown thing. My Mum gave it to me when it first came out, before anyone had ever heard of it. She had no idea what it was and nor did I. So I whipped through it quickly, finding it a ludicrous and badly written page-turner, and forgot about it. Then I started seeing people reading it everywhere and was perplexed. Had I missed something? Why was this bog-standard\u00a0book suddenly so popular? I pulled my copy off the shelf and rattled through it again in a couple of hours. I was still perplexed.)<\/p>\n With ‘literature’ (I know that’s a problematic term) cultural capital works differently. It’s all about what you’ve read, and about not mentioning what you haven’t read. Worse still, it can be about pretending you’ve finished something you haven’t, which I certainly did on occasion when I was younger. Everyone likes to seem better read than they are.<\/p>\n These days I’m more honest. Yes, there are piles\u00a0of books – many of them considered great – I’ve never read. I would like to get through some of them; others I likely never will. And while there’s definitely an element of cultural capital involved, the older I get the less I think about what I ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ read. I just want to read books that are well written, books that are moving or inspiring, scary or thought provoking, books that revel in language, books that are fun, and books that just tell a good story well.<\/p>\n Does\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0fit any of those categories for me? Maybe one day I’ll find out. Happy Bloomsday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"