Ulysses : a critical and synoptic edition

It was Faulkner who said that you need to approach Joyce like an illiterate preacher to the Old Testament: with faith. I wouldn't call Ulysses a novel, because if you go into it thinking it's a novel, you'll get frustrated and give it up and maybe light it on fire. You've got to treat it almost like it's a religious text, read it carefully and apply your own meaning and life lessons to the passages. Joyce was trying to find a way to bridge ancient religious texts with the everyday lives that we all live, and he did it by writing this clusterf**k of a book. If you're even considering reading this, give it a try (but don't expect to get it immediately), and you need to recognize that this isn't a mere novel and that he wrote this to give a higher meaning to modern living.