Ulysses: a first reading, and the apparatus built around it

One day: Thursday, 16 June 1904, Dublin. One first cover-to-cover reading of the book that holds it — James Joyce's Ulysses, read 7–17 July 2026, Penguin Modern Classics, introduction and notes by Declan Kiberd (1922 text). This site is built out of that reading. It is not a blog, and it is not a single essay. The build is finished: what is built is built, what stays planned stays planned by design, and each page says which it is, honestly.

The doors

Each of these is a real room, named for what is in it:

• The reading — the primary record: the full Q&A of the read, the questions-only set, and the Four Odysseys comparative.
• The book's own words — the passages that produced the reading's hardest moments, verbatim from the 1922 text, set beside the reader's words. Each one is verified against the source at every build.
• By episode — the day's eighteen episodes as an index into everything below: which objects pass through each, which women enter there, which instruments of rule mark it, where one first reading struggled. An index, not a companion.
• The dimensions — the analytic studies themselves: seven types of operation, each study earning its output in up to four registers. The same studies open from the register side at by register.
• The reference documents — the characters (with the interactive ring), the world and city of 1904, and the itinerary of place and hour (with the map and time rail).
• The method — how all of this was made: the four registers, the seven types, the advisors, and the project's own published log of its errors.