Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

So I was reading Dwight Garner in the New York Times.

He's a more than usually good book reviewer and he's making a claim for a book and saying

that it's really a brand new voice in literary nonfiction. It's by Kevin Birmingham. It's a book called The Most Dangerous

Book, The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses. And for the longest time, a book like this

would have been published by the Something University Press. Instead, this book is published by the Penguin Press, and I thought,

I want to read it because the reviewer made the book sound so exciting. And yeah, the way back

into Ulysses, a book that we're not all reading anymore,

although we all once did and wanted to.

Even my mom wanted to be guided through the book

because it was supposed to be such a...

A tour to force. Yeah. Such a...

A tour to force.

You know, the thing that made Ulysses amazing for people at the time, and I think

is still amazing now, is that it was a book that seemed to contain everything, right?

That there was nothing unsaid.

Any wild thought you might have.

...