Today is the day we literary types take pause, raise a pint and eat livers and other nasty stuff to honor a book most of us have never read to completion.

Today is Bloomsday, which celebrates the June 16 meanderings of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in the highly confusing James Joyce masterpiece Ulysses.

To even read the first chapter of this book is an accomplishment and to go through the remaining 17 chapters, all with different styles, is almost like conquering Everest or coming up with a solution to the Roanoke Rapids Theatre debacle.

Most people who have read the book to completion are people who have a lot of degrees before and after their names. They are the ones who tell us what the book is about and probably had a hand in creating the Cliff Notes so students could pass literature class.

I've read some complicated stuff — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Sound and the Fury and fourth grade math books — but I never could get through Ulysses.

It's probably because I didn't have to read it for a class so there was no incentive to go find Cliff Notes and spend the rest of my academic career reading it and then finding someone who could help me understand what I just read, unlike the time in high school where I did a book report on the paperback adaptation of Young Frankenstein.

My synopsis would be something like a social media post: Guy walks around Dublin, thinks about a lot of stuff while his wife is dreaming about Andalusian girls on a mountain top.

Of course, in the social media age, Leopold Bloom would be posting pictures left and right of his day with captions like, “Hangin' at the pub drinkin' a tall one,” “How about that funeral we went to,” “Stoppin' by the newspaper to place an ad,” “Lustin' over woman layin' on the beach and, oh yeah, I think it might be Hannah and her Horse!”

Meanwhile, Stephen Dedalus would be posting photos of his overbearing roommate Buck Mulligan who is imitating religious rites with a shaving bowl and straight razor saying, “Buck has lost his mind … AGAIN. SMH! Why can't I meet Hannah and her Horse although the Rob Lowe ads were funnier.”

So today, many people around the world, even in the good, old USA, are celebrating a book that ends with essentially a run-on sentence where Leopold's wife Molly delivers a 40-page soliloquy that covers everything from breakfast in bed to the final rambling where she remembers Leopold proposing to her because it is memorable from the scene in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School.

My Bloomsday would begin something like this:

got up this morning and thought to myself today is Bloomsday and I should write a column about a book I've never read to completion but I did make it about halfway through and that's something to be proud of kind of like scaling half of Everest and coming up with a half a solution to the Roanoke Rapids Theatre debacle but first I need breakfast because I'm hungry but I don't feel like anything heavy, and a muffin would be nice so let's go to Starbucks and because it's Bloomsday I should really meander around Roanoke Rapids today thinking about random stuff but it's way too hot and I'll be sweating by the time I meet the first person on the street and they'll ask me why I'm sweating and I'll give them a smart alec answer like have you looked at a thermometer in the last five minutes and then they walk away insulted because it's somehow my fault they asked the stupid question but I could have just said because it's hot but that's still a smart alec answer but I'm wandering around Roanoke Rapids on June 16 because it's Bloomsday and they ask what's that and I say it's a day honoring a book most of us have never read to completion and they ask why would you celebrate a book you've never read to completion unless you've got a bunch of degrees in front and behind your name and I say because it's something we literary types do and they ask why again and I say don't you want to talk about why I'm sweating and they say I assumed it was because it's hot outside and there's a heat advisory and I tell them it's not so much the heat as it is the humidity to which they heartily agree but tell me I need to take a vacation to the beach and try to think of stuff that isn't so heavy like just sticking my toes in the sand and taking a picture of my feet with my toes in the sand but I think with my luck it wouldn't do me any good to put my toes in the sand because they would get bitten by some thing with claws but then I think of Hannah and her Horse on the beach and yes, I said, yes, Hannah and myself ride off on her horse only to get eaten by a shark and that's when I remembered the Rob Lowe ads were funnier .

So, yeah, today is Bloomsday and we're taking time out to celebrate a book we've never read to completion — Lance Martin