Yes

Ulysses by James Joyce
Alma Classics, 878pp, £9.99, 2015
ISBN 978 1 84749 399 6

Ulysses has been sitting on my shelf for a while.  I can’t remember exactly when I bought it but it must have been in a moment of reading optimism that quickly dissipated and the book sat, unread, for a number of years.  I think it was the book’s reputation that was off-putting: a long, difficult, wordy read, only enjoyable to Joyce professors and hard to understand without having an extensive knowledge to match Joyce’s.  All I knew was that it tracks its characters through a single day in Dublin, and has a number of parallels to Homer’s Odyssey (Ulysses is the Latinisation of Odysseus).  As I have recently read the Odyssey as part of this journey through the Western Canon, it seemed like a good opportunity to give Ulysses a try, and I found the book to be difficult and challenging, yes, but also surprisingly readable (for the most part) and engaging.  I will certainly have to return to the book in the future for a second reading, but my first reading has left me not only with a sense of accomplishment for having read it, but also an understanding of why readers find so much in the book.