Oh yes indeed, Ulysses is the second or third best novel of the century, after Finnegans Wake and possibly Remembrance of Things Past ( and incidentally anyone who inserts an apostrophe into the title of Finnegans Wake should be dismissed out of hand).
A couple of points of advice:
(i) You’re going to find it difficult, be you high-school student or Harold Bloom. Some books just are hard.
(ii) As a corollary to that you’re not going to understand it all on a first reading: get what you can and save the rest for the next time. This incredible depth is part of its greatness. Simon Barnes wrote that “There are many good works of literature but there are only three great ones: The Iliad, The Divine Comedy and Ulysses.” I wouldn’t go that far but you should bear in mind Joyce’s advice that that this is a book to spend your life on.
I’ll absolutely second the Blamire’s recommendation. Amongst friends, the crucial hump appears to be chapter 3: all that “inelctuable modality of the visible.” Get over that and you’re coasting until chapter 14 (?), which is the maternity one. That really is the dazzlingly unreadable one. But by then your’re on the home straight.
Get your head round the basics and it’s a fabulous read. But Dubliners and the Portrait are the precquisates.
I read it as a much younger person, when I had an enormous crush on a guy who thought that the sun rose and set on James Joyce’s say-so. You can imagine how much I got out of that reading! (The object of my crush is now a professor of philosophy, so I guess he really did get a lot out of it.)
Since then, I read parts of it in college, and it was much better going. Discussing it with other people, and our professor, made a huge difference, and I was very wowed by the parts we covered in class. I would like to tackle the whole thing again someday.
I read it, and ended up liking it a lot, but it took a while. My professor said, “Ulysses is a book that can not be read, only re-read,” and he was absolutely right- the first time through, it is very close to completely incoherant. I went through once with the help of Cliffs Notes, then twice more without the training wheels.
It really is worth the effort, in my opinion, but it’s certainly the hardest thing I’ve read.
Then again, I haven’t tried Finnegan’s Wake.
Get over it? It’s one of my favourite parts!
I shall tackle this daunting task in the new year. Also, I’m going to see if the Joycean scholars at UCG (University City Galway) will allow me to sit in on lectures (auditing).
I must admit I know I’m not prepared, but I’m going to give it a go. I’ll let you know next year this time how far I’ve gotten.
(BTW, I just read about the title “Finnegans Wake” and the lack of the apostrophe.)
I absolutely agree that the chapter’s great stuff and I wouldn’t want it not to exist - nor indeed (hell, especially not) Oxen of the Sun. It’s just that it is the bit that seems to throw first time readers early on. So that they become people who’ve only ever read part of it. Pretending to them that some bits aren’t hard on first acquaintence does them no favours.
You know, reading these posts, I’m really glad now I dropped that one summer course that required its students to read the entire book in the course of two to three weeks…
Hey bonzer - them oxen is what did me in. i was slogging thru with my companion volume, and finally figured “What was the point.” It was not enjoyable. I was simply doing it to say I had done it. So I stopped. There is far too much more enjoyable to read.
I am always slightly suspicious of folk who say they can simply read it through - and enjoy it - as a novel.
IMO, it is an impressive work. JJ sure created the fodder for a tremendous volume of grad school interpretation. But I don’t foresee wasting my time trying to get through it again. If I wanted to, I’d try to do it along with some kind of course/discussion group.
Ana,
When you get to Ireland, come to Dublin for Blooms Day (you’ll be on about chapter 2 by then). Wear a nice frock, eat gorgonzola and drink port. Walk on Sandymount Strand, have a meal in the Ormond Hotel, flirt outrageously (and pointlessly) with David Norris. You then fulfil all the eligibility requirements for the title “Renowned Joycean” and you needn’t bother your petticoated arse reading Ulysses;).
…if you’re going to flirt in the proper outrageous Joycean style, leave off the petticoats and lean waaaaaaaaay back. 
I read it a month ago, after about two months of reading. I definitely recommend the Blamires book, as well as some variation of Ulysses Annotated.
The first six chapters or so are difficult, but can be waded through without too much help…Between Aeolus and Oxen of the Sun everything seemed to just get harder.
Only read when pumped full of intravenous caffeine. I read Portrait of the Artist beforehand and that helped as well; it’s not nearly as hard as some make it out to be.
Being a proudly pretentious so and so, I had to read Ulysses. My take on it was that it was like anything by David Guterson: Long on narrative, heavy on truly beautiful writing, thin on actual substance.
It wasn’t a fun read, but if you can lose yourself in the actual writing and get out of the feeling like you’re in some kind of German Industrial movie filmed by a drunken Impressionist, it’s pretty good. As noted above, it’s some of the most beautiful use of the English language, but that’s really about it.
One last comment on this book (kinda interesting, IMO):
“I finished Ulysses and thing it is a misfire… The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky.”
- Virginia Woolf, diary entry for September 6, 1922
Virginia Woolf characterized Joyce’s writing as (badly paraphrased, sorry) “a sophomore squeezing his pimples.”
I love her writing, but she sucked monkey-poop as a critic.