James Joyce Ramble spread out along the course. Six Joycean works have been selected, and the story being told changes each of the six miles of the race. The works, in the order in which they are read are: Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Dubliners, and The Dead. In 2014, to celebrate the 100th Centennial of the publishing of Dubliners, three dozen actors all read from this book of short stories by Joyce. In conjunction with the James Joyce Ramble, there is an event called “Take a Walk” to benefit the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants part were largely taken from literary and oral traditions and as such contain supernatural materials (what "Bamboo-Inquiring Master", possibly Shi Yukun himself, described as "the occasional strange and bizarre event"). In comparison, the second part exclusively represents Shi's creative genius and is devoid of superstition. The 1879 novel does not complete by the 120th and final chapter, instead, in the final page the readers are referred to a sequel book titled "The Five Younger Gallants" (小五義), which was said to be "close to a hundred chapters". In 1890, a novel with that title was published by another Beijing publisher, Wenguang