Upon all the living and the dead: Joyce’s masterly prose, where not a word is wasted and even the most tiny and economical chapters can conjure distant shores. Whether your favourite is the self-absorbed Gabriel, swooning “faintly through the universe and faintly falling,” as he pictures his imagined love rival’s grave, or lovelorn Frank, the handsome merchant seaman, abandoned by his callous love as he slips moorings from the quay, or the seedy CP enthusiast the boys meet up Ringsend way while on a day’s miching, it’s a complete and miniscule universe in a softback 200 pages. The importance of words in a single treatise. Almost perfection.