Is James Joyce's Ulysses the hardest

novel to finish?
James Joyce died 75 years ago this week, leaving a lifetime of books beloved
by many... and Ulysses, heralded as both the best novel in the English
language and the hardest to read. So what do you do if you get stuck?

Wednesday 13 January 2016 17.26 GMTLast modified on Monday 6

February 2017 14.36 GMT

When James Joyce finished writing Ulysses, he was so exhausted that

he didnt write a line of prose for a year. I can believe it; I needed a
nap after reading 40 pages.

For the last three months, Ive glared at its fat, lumpen form on my
floor with a vague sense of personal failure. Ive opened Ulysses
twice, determined to finish it, and achieved getting all the way to page
46 (its a bit longer than that). I have read so little both times I
started that I have never bothered with a bookmark; it seemed too
sad flagging such a hollow achievement.

At first, it was fun. Ulysses isnt like anything else Ive read. There are
a plethora of lines that I immediately decided to use on a daily basis,
like: Lend us a loan of your noserag (Ho! thought I, filing it away
for things to say next time I have a cold) and: Well have a glorious
drunk to astonish the druidy druids (filed away under things to
holler on a night out).

Even when staring at cramped pages without absorbing a word, I

thought nice thoughts about it: I like the community this book has
spawned, its inherent sense of freedom and celebration of all things
rude and true. I like that it created a holiday. I like that the anarchic
style and language allows for readers to pick and choose how they
read it some recommend skipping chapter three, some
recommend reading it only after reading ABOUT it, some
recommend reading it mostly aloud but I still get stuck.

Why do I get stuck? Im not entirely sure myself. On the Most

difficult novels list on Goodreads, Joyce takes the top two spots, with
Ulysses in top position and Finnegans Wake plodding behind for
second place. A lot of the Goodreads top 10 Moby-Dick, Gravitys
Rainbow are weighty tomes, but I like big books (and I cannot lie). I
think what is holding me hostage to page 46 is the language: the big
fat bursts of Chaucerian English, sprinkled with slang and jaunty
dialogue that, while entertaining me, is also leaving me a little lost.
There are a few other worthy works of literature Ive yet to read
including fellow top 10-ers Infinite Jest and War and Peace but
they only spark little pangs of shame that I have not read and/or
enjoyed them. I really want to love Ulysses and I feel deeply
frustrated that all the while appreciating its uniqueness and its
weightiness and its Joyceness, I cant finish the damn thing.

Virginia Woolf thought Ulysses was not in her words

bollocks, calling it in her words an illiterate, underbred book as
she raged in her diaries about the pressure to finish it: I... have been
amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters--
to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, &
disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
But then Nabokov loved it. It seems Ulysses is a different experience
for everyone: Ive read it likened to sex (sometimes unpleasant, big
pay off at the end), Jazz-fusion (an innovative of genre), and a boxing
match (wanting to punch yourself in the face at page 46, probably).

I like James Joyce: I enjoyed Dubliners, his excellent choice of

spectacles and his frankly odd erotic letters to Nora Barnacle (Dirty
little Fuckbird is another fantastic Joyce-ism, filed away under
things I wont say in front of my nan). So, people who love Ulysses,
what am I getting wrong? Or is it okay to struggle, and proceed
victorious to page 800-odd on the third, fourth, eighteenth try?