According to Melvyn Bragg, whose opinion was echoed by the numerous academics I have heard pronouncing on the subject these last few days, Ulysses by James Joyce is amongst the most influential but least read books of the 20th century.

My own copy has languished on one shelf or other for over 40 years, being taken on holiday now and then with the firm declaration that this year I would read it and then being replaced with no more than a page or two turned.  There's a postcard of Taunton between pages 138 and 139.  I imagine it got there on the occasion I accompanied my aunt by train between Taunton and Kirkcaldy one snowy festive season in the 90s and I suppose it marks my furthest point of penetration.

But I am in good company.  For instance Niamh Cusack who performed the Molly Bloom monologue in yesterday's brilliant dramatisation on Radio 4 admitted to never having read the book, except obviously for her bit.  I saw the monologue done on-stage once but it didn't grab me whereas the radio one did.  It's reckoned to be the longest sentence in world literature running in my edition from page 659 to page 704.

Several commentators declared this to be the best place to start reading and maybe that's true but I wouldn't bother reading any of it as long as the dramatisation with which the BBC celebrated Bloomsday 2012 is available.  Get it now.

I've read 138 times as much of Ulysses as of Finnegan's Wake but I'm now formally abandoning any ambition to read it.  I'm hanging on for the BBC to dramatise it.