WHICH great books should children read? Ulysses by James Joyce, according to the poet laureate, Andrew Motion. Is this man a little out of touch or plain bonkers?

The Royal Society of Literature this week asked authors to nominate their top ten books for children to have read by the time they leave school. Writers including Philip Pullman, JK Rowling and Motion offered their thoughts.

Pullman's choices included Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare and The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Rowling's preferred texts numbered Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, The Tale Of Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter, and two American classics, The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (no argument from me about those last two).

Alongside Ulysses, the poet laureate's suggestions included Don Quixote by Migel de Certantes, Hamlet by Shakespeare and The Waste Land by TS Eliot.

"Of course it's a high ambition," he said of his reading list.

Well, that's one way of putting it. As someone who has read Ulysses twice, I know something about this notoriously difficult novel. I read Joyce's classic half a lifetime ago as a student and returned to it last summer, as a self-inflicted punishment for consuming too many whodunits.

Having developed an addiction to James Lee Burke and his Robicheaux novels, I decided it was time for a spot of literary self-flagellation. No more American crime books for me - time to revisit a classic. So that's how I spent much of last summer, sleepless nights and all, ploughing through Ulysses. I re-read my battered Penguin Modern Classics copy, held together with Sellotape, its yellowed pages covered in my would-be academic scribbles.

Having been there twice, I can report that it's not an easy novel. Some people view Ulysses as a true classic, others as an unreadable novel that is little short of a literary con trick. Much of the writing is marvellous, clear, evocative and funny. Plenty of it comes close to being impenetrable, so is it really a good suggestion for teenagers? Of course it isn't. It could put them off novels for life. I suppose such young readers could be directed towards the mucky passages, but even those take some unravelling.

In an age of computer games, email and text-speak, it is hard enough to get young people interested in reading anything on old-fashioned, non-interactive paper. But this is still a worthwhile exercise, because good novels and poetry can be a companion for life, even in these days of Celebrity Big Brother brashness.

Take the Ancient Mariner, which Pullman found "mesmerising" when it was read out at school. Now that is a poem to dazzle the mind. I studied Coleridge's poem for O-level and fragments have stayed with me ever since, comforting bits of literary flotsam. The text book we used was Chosen Poems 1961, even though it was the early-1970s by then. The pages are covered in earnest pencilled observations, such as "west usually associated with death". Wow - did I have a brain back then or what?

I can still quote many passages, much in the way I can recall Shakespeare's Richard II saying "I wasted time and now doth time waste me".

The most famous lines of the Ancient Mariner are often misquoted - it's "water, water every where/Nor any drop to drink", which gives me an idea (see below).

A colleague says I should come up with my own top ten for children, based on my own offspring. Do guitar magazines count? Or games mags? The closest I've come to passing on the bookish baton is in converting the 17-year-old to reading James Lee Burke novels. He's a bright boy, but Ulysses? Not a bloody chance.

HERE, with apologies to Coleridge, is an amended extract from The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, with a certain York leisure centre (presently deceased) in mind:

"Water, water every where/And all the boards did shrink/Water, water every where/Nor any drop to swim in."

All right, it doesn't rhyme but it does chime.

Updated: 08:43 Thursday, February 02, 2006