I was listening to some new music on Spotify the other day when one of the songs (or it could have been an album title or band name; I don’t remember which; it wasn’t very memorable) mentioned a lighthouse.

Sometimes my mind makes strange connections. I remember a few years ago when elections were being held in Great Britain. Every time I heard the name Nick Clegg, the chorus to Pink Floyd’s “Corporal Clegg” would play in my head.

On this day, this completely unmemorable song (or album or band name) made me think about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a book I have never read. For that matter, I’ve never read anything else by her.

Naturally, for me anyway, I was compelled to look up the book to see what it was about. It might be something I was interested in. Turns out I wasn’t. It kind of fell into the category of not now, but it’s so well regarded, so maybe one day.

For some reason, it was another of her well-regarded novels that caught my eye: Mrs. Dalloway. I’m not sure why, but this novel seemed more intriguing and I thought I should definitely keep an eye out for it (I tend to prefer hard covers).

As I read on about Mrs. Dalloway, the Wikipedia article (don’t judge) stated:

Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs. Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a text that is often considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century (though Woolf herself, writing in 1928, apparently denied this).

As you’ve probably guessed, I was off to read about Joyce’s masterpiece. I’ve always been aware of Ulysses, but I’ve never given it much thought, perhaps thinking it was too difficult to even consider. But I also thought that if I want to read Mrs. Dalloway, I should probably look into Ulysses first.

Reading on, I learned that Ulysses is the Latinized version of the Greek name Odysseus (I should have known this) and that there are many parallels between Joyce’s novel and Homer’s epic The Odyssey. Now I was definitely intrigued. It was time to add Ulysses to my mental list of future reads.

However, I haven’t read The Odyssey yet. In order to appreciate Ulysses, I’ll have to read The Odyssey before hand, right? And how will I be able to enjoy the second of Homer’s great epics, without having read the first?

So, now I wait for my copy of The Iliad to arrive in 3 to 6 days.