Secret Life of Books

On 20 June, 1904, the 22-year-old James Joyce got blind drunk with some friends in Dublin. He threw up outside the rehearsal rooms of WB Yeat’s Irish Literary Theatre then insulted one of the actresses. Later, he approached a young woman, apparently alone. The word used in biographies is usually ‘accosted’, although it’s not clear what that means. It turned out she wasn’t alone, but had a date - a soldier - who beat up Joyce, leaving him with a black eye, sprained wrist and ankle and various cuts. Joyce was rescued by a friend of his father called Alfred Hunter.

This incident - usually presented as a hilarious jape - but evidently quite terrifying for the women involved - became the inspiration for Joyce’s masterpiece - and one of the most revered novels of the 20th Century - Ulysses.

Ulysses is a vast novel - over a quarter of a million words. Yet it follows the action of less than 24 hours. To be fair, Joyce packs a lot into that 24 hours. Although our old friend Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom dominate the action, there are over 200 named characters. And, as ever, the most important character is Dublin itself.

The story and structure is loosely modelled on The Odyssey with the different chapters named after episodes in Homer’s poem. The first section follows Stephen Daedalus, just as The Odyssey begins with Odysseus’ son Telemachus. Then Leopold Bloom, a 38 year old Jewish advertising canvasser, takes centre stage with Odysseus’ various adventures given modern-day, satirical equivalents. At the climax, Leopold and Stephen are united and return home, where Molly Bloom - the Penelope of the story - has the final word. The word is ‘yes’, although this is one of the rare occasions where one hearkens after a curmudgeonly ‘no’.

Ulysses is famous for its form. The novel begins in a similar mode to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a sort of stream-of-consciousness lite. But Joyce is giving us a false sense of security. Within a couple of episodes, the stream-of-consciousness is so disconnected from the world it is hard to tell what is actually going on. One chapter mimics the layout and language of a newspaper article, another is a play, another is a call-and-answer series of questions like a catechism.

As ever, the road to publication was for Joyce long, fraught and tetchy. Serialisation began in an American periodical called The Little Review in 1918, but was stopped after the Nausicaa episode in which Leopold bloom masturbates on the beach. Outraged by court intervention, Joyce filled the rest of the book with the then unprintable ‘f’ word, the ‘c’ word and descriptions of oral sex. He feared it would never be published, but Sylvia Beach, the owner of a now-famous bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare & Co. came to the rescue and published it in France in 1922.

So… like Odysseus finally reaching Ithaca, we have finally reached Ulysses after referring to it, usually in disparaging terms, over the life of this podcast. And the question is, how are we going to approach it? Are we going to fall to our knees and kiss the shores? Or will we grab bow and arrow and lay waste to the palace?

And if you’re concerned we’re sounding just a little too flip, it’s worth remembering that Joyce himself said that Ulysses ‘is fundamentally a humorous work’, filled with word-play, toilet humour and irreverence.

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This week we take a – somewhat unplanned – detour from our James Joyce sequence, which we put on pause while we finished reading the book! We're taking the chance to include in our series on modern Odysseys an episode we recorded a while ago on the 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s masterly short novel Greek Lessons.
Written in Korean and set in Seoul, Greek Lessons is another moment in which a modern writer takes on the characters and preoccupations of the Odyssey and reinvents them to tell a story about Korea's complex history. Greek Lessons is about an Ancient Greek teacher in Seoul who is losing his sight, and a Korean student who has lost her capacity to speak.The title and opening sentences of Greek Lessons take us directly to big, epic stories about prophecy, blindness and insight, referring among others to the blinded prophet Tiresias, who gives Odysseus predictions about what awaits him in his attempt to return to Ithaca. The novel starts with a reference to the great Argentinian writer Jeorg Luis Borges. As his dying wish, Borges requested the epitaph ‘He took the sword and laid the naked metal between them.’ What Han Kang doesn’t tell us (we’re meant to figure it out) is that Borges went blind in his 50s he became Argentina’s national librarian and learned Old English so he could read Beowulf and other Norse sagas.
Across all her novels Kang tells stories of pain, loss and suffering as pathways to unexpected transformation and freedom. She connects her themes directly to the long histories of violence in North and South Korea and she also wants readers to know she’s talking about all suffering and violence over human history, including in the archaic Greek past.

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One evening in 1898, the 16-year-old James Joyce lost his virginity with a sex worker on a canal bank in Dublin. The event would become the main event in his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published the same year as Dubliners in 1914.
Joyce’s sexual awakening prompted both a spiritual crisis and a renewed determination to be a great writer.
Portrait tells the story of Joyce’s avatar, Stephen Daedalus, from childhood to graduation. Ultimately, it is about Daedalus’ hard-won rejection of all the baggage of late 19th Century Irish society - religion, morality, English intellectual colonization, and the social stagnation of Dubliners (discussed last week). Daedalus, of course, was the inventor of Greek myth who made himself wings to escape his prison - and the book ends with Stephen escaping the prison of his childhood by turning to the supposed intellectual freedom of Europe.
While being well known for its treatment of sexual awakening, the book is also famous for Joyce’s enthusiastic adoption of the stream-of-consciousness technique emerging in European literature, in which the narrative follows the trajectory of the characters thoughts.
In this episode, we look at the intellectual journey Joyce took between 1907 - when he started writing Portrait - and 1914, when Ezra Pound had it published.

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We’ve been saving this one up for a special occasion – a live conversation with Professor Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of Homer’s Odyssey and the version on which Christopher Nolan’s film is said to be based. Emily has long been revered in the academic world, and she’s currently the toast of the internet for remarks about the Nolan adaptation not having enough sex or nice food on display (here on SLOB, we agree!)
Back in February 2026, Sophie hosted a conversation live in Princeton, with Emily, and the brilliant academic rising star of epic poems, Prof. Pasquale Toscano. In this crackling discussion, the talk turns quickly to why epics matter, what they mean, and how they pass their brilliance across time and place. Emily and Pasquale say lots of surprisingly, trenchant and thought-provoking things about why epics are such an important form, both then and now.

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For this extra special A Podcast of One’s Own × The Secret Life of Books crossover, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Sophie Gee sit down to celebrate their shared love of books and reading.

Julia and Sophie compare notes on hosting book podcasts, share their lifelong love of literature, and reflect on their experiences chairing two of the world's leading literary prizes for women and non-binary writers – the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Stella Prize.

Hosted by Julia Gillard, A Podcast of One's Own brings listeners extraordinary stories from remarkable women shaping the world through their work. Alongside these conversations, Julia's Book Club – co-hosted by Kathy Lette and Sarah Holland-Batt – celebrates brilliant books by women each fortnight.

Hosted by Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole, The Secret Life of Books uncovers the hidden stories behind the world's most iconic books, revealing the scandalous backstories, secret meanings and surprising histories that have shaped the way we read them.

We hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as we enjoyed having it.

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