It's only Mount Everest if you treat it like Mt Everest. Don't be scared of this book, it's really quite enjoyable. Yes, there are a few very dense passages, but there are also a lot of quite simple, entertaining passages too. What struck me first about the book was how funny it can be.
I took 30 Hungarian students through this book, all reading it in English, and they loved it. Not bad for a book that most British literary critics dismiss as 'unreadable'.
I think the reason I could make it so entertaining for them was because, unknowingly, I was kind of adopting a syntopic reading approach, or at least a 'whole mind' approach. you have to read around Ulysses, bring in lots of other guides to help you along the way, and then it makes perfect sense.
Treat it as a syntopic reading project: PR about 20 books about Joyce and Ulysses without activating, then use the whole mind system on the novel itself (I can provide a list for anyone who's interested, and will even email my handouts and lecture notes to anyone who wants them too, once I've converted them into a pdf). Don't look at it as Mt Everest - look at it as a big bouncy castle you can have lots of fun in!
Ulysses. UK
