Part of the problem in dealing with Joyce is the bipolar attitude of most English faculty: Either total veneration of total dismissal. (This later category considers Joyce too modern to deserve serious consideration, yet. He hasn’t been dead over 100 years.)
Back when I was an undergraduate I remember writing a paper on Joyce where I quoted “foot in mouth disease”. The professor redlined it, saying I’d obviously misread the Master. Nope, the joke was that simple.
I loved teaching Araby, later in life. Great introduction to the use of symbols. Unfortunately it is lost on many students.
If your orientation is more modern I’d suggest starting with a different author: read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. There’s enough reference that would be recognized by the modern, younger reader, that the difficulty isn’t that insurmountable. Good preparation for Joyce.
Any faculty member who assigned Ulysses to freshmen in two weeks deserves to be fired. Dubliners, yeah. Portrait of an Artist, yeah. But not Ulysses.
As to Finnegan’s Wake, as someone else said: read it at random. Most likely it was written that way.
There’s a wonderful Dos Possos book entitled The Best of Times. Probably have to go to a library or used book store to find it. It chronicles Paris when Joyce, Dos Possos, Stein, cummings, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, etc. were all living there post WWI.
May I note that I have a serious problem with any work that requires erading two other books devoted solely to explaining it, as well as reading the actual book itself 2-3 times for comprehension? I mean honestly, it strongly sounds like there are many, many more productive and fun and intellectual things I could do with my life.
What is your serious problem, bandit?
There are levels of literature. Jacqueline Suzzane and Co. produce words by the bushelful. And entertain some of the people some of the time.
But ultimately literature must go beyond just entertaining. Sooner or later the idea occurs that someone else lived this life and may have learned something that was beneficial to know. I mean you weren’t handed a user’s manual at birth.
So you go searching for a user’s manual. And most of them are insipid. Don’t each chickens and you’ll obtain enlightenment. Bread is not the staff of life. (The Atkins Diet). And most of life is a quandry, anyway.
So you seek out someone who speaks to you. Who helps you see more. Who gets you through the night. Could be that’s Johnny Cash. Could be it’s Grace Slick (who has sung eloquently about Molly Bloom.)
Then you find out that there are cracks in the world. (Leonard Cohen tells you that.) And that’s how the light gets in. So you start looking for things that will crack the world. You could get “Cracked Up” by Fitzgerald. Or go on a “Long Day’s Journey” with O’Neill. And then, perhaps, you stumble upon someone like James Joyce, or Thomas Pynchon, or William Faulkner, or even Tom Robbins. And your whole blackberry patch is just blown to smithereens and ends up on a pack of camels in the middle of the desert.