I have tried reading Ulysses but just can't get through it. Here's a paragraph from the second chapter.
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Sainte Geneviève where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
Some chapters get easier but then we're back to more literary experimentations and Joyce basically showing off his amazing knowledge of things.
I was having trouble and someone who said he was reading through the classics in his free time said just read through it. And that he had read Ulysses in just a week, which I found astonishing. Did he read it carefully, I wondered? He said he didn't get a lot of stuff but it doesn't matter, he still enjoyed it.
Anyhow, I said I I can't read what I don't understand. like I first need to learn more about philosophy, history, religion, Ireland, etc. Or at least need to have a few books and webpages open to look up each reference Joyce makes (and he makes plenty). And that is assuming I can understand his stream-of-consciousness style which I often can't. So it will definitely take me way longer than a week or two.
Some other people also report difficulties with Joyce but also passages or books from other writers, like Faulkner, Woolf, Pynchon, and so on. Yet there are many people who would tell you they enjoyed the work and had no issues. Yet, when you ask them more questions, you realize they did not necessarily understand what they read.
So where do you stand? Do you think one should take the same approach to literature as we often do to poetry, to accept there will always remain some mystery and we will never know certain things for sure? And that perhaps we don't even need to know them. Or do you think that unless one really understands a book they are reading, they are not putting in the effort the type of book demands and perhaps they can't claim to have really read the book?
Edit: errors and clarity
by Noyolov