I grew up in Dublin, and lived in Chapelizod - close to where Joyce did - and always felt a weak pressure to read Ulysses. It's talked about so much it almost becomes a nuisance not to have read it.

Like you, I could never get past a few chapters ... but it all clicked for me when I read the final chapter first. The final chapter is very readable, very fun, and very risque ... and to me it was a surprising read, it's not what I expected at all from an Edwardian Dubliner.

Having read the final chapter, I was much more motivated to read the rest ... I wanted to read more of what this writer was up to.

I got approximately to the middle, but I'm still wondering if I should have tried the original instead of buying a german translation (it's my mother language). Maybe all the enjoyable parts got lost in translation? The part where I gave up was a chapter written with such a heavy dialect that reading each sentence started getting a chore.