Happy Bloomsday

Tuesday marks the 105th Anniversary of Bloomsday—that single day in 1904 in which Ulysses famously unfolds—and the world is celebrating. Irishmen are trying to track down every single pub in the book, devotees are tweeting its 10th chapter, and everyone is chuckling over the Times of London’s original pan of the book. But in an Op-Ed for the New York Times, Collum McCann does something a little different to celebrate: he shares his experience reading Ulysses—in which he discovered the likeness of his own grandfather. “After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom,” he writes of his ancestor, adding, “The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.”