From the NYT:

The city’s Nobel laureates alone include the poet Seamus Heaney, the novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett (“Waiting for Godot”), the poet William Butler Yeats and the playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (“Pygmalion”). Among those who grew up here are Oscar Wilde (“The Picture of Dorian Gray”), Jonathan Swift (“Gulliver’s Travels”) and Bram Stoker (“Dracula”). James Joyce (“Ulysses”) is in a category of his own. And then one must pay heed to the great wit Flann O’Brien, the ombibulous poet Brendan Behan, the novelist and playwright Maeve Binchy (“Circle of Friends”) and the novelist Roddy Doyle (“The Commitments”).

And, of course, there are the pubs. It has been argued that the slow and steady intake of Guinness stout, which has been made in Dublin since 1759 and is served in almost every bar, has long lent rhetorical velocity to this city’s writers, in the manner that the Green Bay Packers are powered by Wisconsin cheese.

Chapters, the largest independent bookstore in Ireland, has a sign on the wall that delivers this threat: “Shoplifters will be made to read Ulysses. If we catch you twice, it’s Finnegans Wake.” (I’d rather be forced to read Moby Dick.)