The Overlooked Masterpieces of 1922
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After wanting to read Ulysses my whole life and failing several times, I finally took an Extension course at Stanford in it, led by a teacher who'd been teaching it for 50 years. All the students were motivated, and I had several critical commentaries available to me. You could hardly ask for a better environment. (If it's not obvious, I'm not the type to dismiss the classics as irrelevant works of dead white men.)
I was mildly positive for most of the book, but I found the last two episodes (we don't call them "chapters") just plain unreadable. In the end, I hate to say it, I think Ulysses is past its sell-by date. Stream of consciousness has been done; multiple viewpoints have been done; sex, excretion, female desire, and other "forbidden" topics have all been done. Those were revolutionary in their time, but now? Meh.
The teacher often said about Joyce, "He can do whatever he wants with the English language!" And I say, "Who cares?"
Joyce himself said that it was just a really funny book. As Virginia Woolf said about it:
A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.
Glad to see Katherine Mansfield in there, I devoured everything she wrote, one of my faves.
If Joyce could do whatever he wanted, what exactly did he want?
Molly's soliloquy is one of the most beautiful things ever written in English - it's what people who haven't read Joyce think of when they think of Joyce ("and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes"!) and it's famous for a reason, And I love the Ithaca episode, how the catechism format lets it interrogate the reader's understanding of the book while elucidating it (preparing you to go back through and read it again!), and how the sleepy late night atmosphere of it slowly descends into dreams. As it ends I find myself starting to hold my breath ("Womb? Weary? He rests. He has travelled." ... all the way up to that pregnant question - "Where?") and then Penelope is one long, gorgeous exhale. What a book. You're going to make me read it again.
Having also taken a class on it, the only really, truly unreadable chapter is Oxen of the Sun. Screw Oxen of the Sun.
Sorry to see this one not mentioned.