Ulysses

This book by Alfred, Lord Tennyson has come up 2 times on Lex Fridman. 2 of those mentions were genuine on-air recommendations, not just passing references. The people who brought it up: Lars Brownworth, Norman Ohler. The earliest mention we indexed is from 2025-09-19 and the most recent from 2026-04-09. Every occurrence below links to the episode page and to the exact second it was said on YouTube.

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book-although he found it not quite obscene enough to disallow its importation into the United States-and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession".