Rating: 
Summary: You may have fooled the others...
Review: but you don't fool me.
It seems that there are three types of Ulysses reviewers out there:
Type 1: "This book is a work of genius that requires great effort, rigor, and intellect in order to digest."
Type 2: "This book is way too smart for me, but I THINK it's good. Everyone says its good, so I'm probably just too dumb to understand. When I read the Cliff's Notes it helped."
Type 3: "Why the f@$k should I "read" something by someone who didn't take the time to "write" something? This is stream-of-consciousness at its most unreachable and unrewarding. This is a slap in the face to Aldous Huxley, Philip Dick, KV, etc. Books by those authors are actually ENLIGHTENING and furthermore, ENJOYABLE(!!!!) to read."
Guess which type of reviewer I am and win a prize.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant work of literature or load of crap?
Review: First of all I tried to like and understand this book.
I have read 200 pages of something that is really boring because some people kept on claiming that it is brilliant. At the moment I don't find it nessesary to read it any furder.
But here are the conclussions I have made.
Why this book is interresting:
-The stream of consience idea is great, really. I love it.
-I also love the idea that he descided to write about some of the things no sensibele writter would have ever written about. Like how Bloom went to the toilet or mastrubated.
Why this book is a load of crap:
-Way to long (I have nothing against long books and I have read quite a lot of books and I love Homer, Dante, Shakespear, Milton, Orwell, Huxley, Poe, Bulgakov, Plato, Swift, Nietzsche, Dickens, Asimov and many more so I do know a bit about litterature) this book should have ended whit the third chapter.
-It lacks a plot. I am not saying that there has to be a overlingly complicated story behind it but it should have some directionlines.
-The languege. Joyce seems to want to point out the whole time how good he knows English and that is very irretating.
-It has no real meaning. I know that people have looked for one but all they have come up whit where some things like it is an epic of the body (well describing how someone goes to the toilet could hardly be discrived as epic. The also spoke about the complex intriging monologs and the praise of the mind (well the just say a lot of things and never seem to be able to think in a straigt line for longer than 3 min. And finally the the so cold new light that Joyce shines on myths. The mostly bring up Odysseus whit this one. Well people seek for Odysseus in this book because Joyce told them to do so.
-Almost anybody could have written this book.
I would also like to point out that when it was released all the people who love this book now (writters and proffesors) hatted this book. If it had never ben forbidden it would have just been forgotten like it perhaps should.
I would like also to say that I didn't stopt reading tis book because it was to difficult but because it was borring. For after all I have read Paradise lost in the orriginal and I do find it difficulter to read that this one.
Perhaps it is just so difficult to read because it is borring has anyone thought about that?
(Excuse me for my English.)
Rating: 
Summary: On faith
Review: I am still digesting "Ulysses." I read it while walking around Dublin a few years ago. It was marvelous to trace the steps of Leopold and Molly, and to see what they "saw," but the novel remains a distant pleasure to the reader. I must admit it is not the most accessible book ever written, but it gets four stars for its intent ... and that it is better than "Finnegan's Wake." Be warned: This book is not for the casual reader.
Rating:
Summary: Impressive
Review: I feel myself quite inadequate to write even a small review on such a masterpiece. This is a book of astonishing beauty and remarkable insight. I do believe it well worth the time and effort. The last few lines are truly the most extraordinay I have ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: a true classic
Review: I tried to read Ulysses when I was about 20. I couldn't get into it. The stream of consciousness put me off completely Now I'm over 60 and I greatly enjoyed the book. I could hardly put it down. The writing is beautiful. I just had to go out and get a gorgonzolia sandwitch with a glass of burgundy.
Rating:
Summary: To read the words is to read the man
Review: I was intimidated at the bulk of ULYSSES, I must admit. But i found myself shocked by it's radiating brilliance. The book is a labor to read, one often has to re-read a paragraph or (god forbid) a chapter to allow the work to truly flow and make sense. Joyce uses beautiful detailed writing of the human mind, all of our peculiar little idiosyncracies and actions that define us as human beings.
The greatest feat I've had in my young life is reading the last page and closing the book. You sit back and for hours are confounded as to the brilliance and success of Joyce to write the actions of two characters in a day. Each thought, each subconscious connection and little bits of thinking and reacting are somehow branded into the pages of ULYSSES. I dont think i will ever read such a significant work again. It is bold, it is at times monotonous, at times incoherent, but there are some golden pages were you are sucked into the writing, for the words on the page are your thoughts, your fantasies, your raw human nature.
It took me a month to read the book, i read it in the midst of depression and suicidal thoughts. I was able to lose myself in ULYSSES, i was able to walk the streets with Dedalus and Bloom. I was able to sit on the beach and watch the dog sniff around for something he had lost in a past life time. It is a masterpiece while being imperfect, which is an awful lot like being a human being.
Rating:
Summary: --Introibo ad altare Dei
Review: I wrote this review previously w/ my other Amazon account but now that I changed email addresses, I'm going to publish this review in this accountUlysses is considered by me to be the greatest book ever written. Now the following review is just the very basic storyline, in order to even begin to fathom the magnitude of it's magnificence, you need to read the other reviews and so here it is. It describes in florid detail a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus, a young would-be-writer -- a character based on Joyce himself. Bloom, a Jewish advertising salesman, spends the day wandering through the streets and offices, pubs and brothels of 1904 Dublin
Rating:
Summary: The book 'they' don't want you to read.
Review: I've always laughed at X-Files fans, but I'm beginning to suspect a conspiracy. For years now, all I've ever heard is 'Ulysses' is unreadable, obtuse, unwieldly. It is anything but, being outrageously funny, unstoppably readable, dementedly inventive. Why would 'they' want us not to read it? Although it has saturated modern culture, Joyce's frightening lessons have been ignored or emasculated - film, literature, art, music are as timid and cliched today as they ever were, as if 'Ulysses' had never existed. 'Ulysses' demands that we think for ourselves, it bursts with inchoate possibilities we must take up for ourselves. Of course we shouldn't read it. But you really must get this edition (Oxford World Classics, edited by Jeri Johnson). go to 'Ulysses' bald, as I have done so many times, and you will probably throw it down after three pages, frustrated, annoyed, anchorless in a river of unfamiliar words, ideas, style. Johnson's annotation here is scrupulous. For each chapter, she registers the Homeric paralells, she discusses the various schema (each chapter has its own colour, art (eg literature, medicine), body organ etc.), she offers a brief critical precis of what is going on. Her notes, explaining historical literary, popular etc. allusions, are indispensible. With the exception of the (mercifully few) Stephen Daedalus chapters, as dense and (generally) dull as their hero, the book is a joyous breeze (well, almost). This in itself is a betrayal of Joyce - we are supposed to be jolted, confused, lost, such is the nature of modern life Joyce wanted us to taste. But he provided all his friends with clues, and we're just as good as them, right? There's no point talking about the discrete ingenuity of each episode, the depth of character, the unheard-of realism in describing their emotional and intellectual lives, the satire, the comedy, the seething anger at authoritarianism, communal idiocy and intellectual myopia, the parodies and pastiches of all literature and other cultural products. Like all great post-modern works (and like Godard, Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce is a fertile POST-modernist, not a strangulated modernist), it will be impossible to read previous literature in the same way before, while it makes almost everything that came after it seem diluted and half-hearted. Leopold Bloom has been called a bourgeois everyman, but if only he was. His kindness, his (however unmethodical) voracious curiosity, his self-awareness, his humour, are as unusual in 1904 Dublin, as they are in our racist, money-mad, mean-minded, self-obsessed, greasy-tilled society today (I mean Ireland of course). My favourite episode is 'Sirens', the ultimate fusion of everything that is 'Ulysses' - character, language, humour, style, parody, satire, anger, emotion. Life. Now for the Wake!
Rating:
Summary: Joyce can teach one how to write.
Review: If you haven't read Ulysses yet, and feel daunted by the wildly different, extremely strident reviews of it, read on and I'll try to explain why this novel is worth your while.
First, a brief summary. Ulysses attempts to capture what life was like in Dublin, Ireland, at the start of the twentieth century. It doesn't do this like a history book, solely in terms of political events and noteworthy individuals; rather, it attempts to convey the nature of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people by following its protagonist, an inoffensive fellow named Leopold Bloom, around the city. (It occasionally switches to following a young man named Stephen Dedalus, whom Bloom meets eventually, but Bloom is the main character.) It describes the things that transpire in the world around Bloom, as well as the thoughts that go on inside his head.
Ulysses contains many disparate literary styles, but none are gratuitous; all are used in the service of the novel's themes. Joyce wanted to show how poetry, history, heroism, romanticism, and indeed all of human civilization, can be found slumbering in each individual, no matter how mundane his life might be. This comes to the fore in chapter 14, in which Bloom goes to a maternity ward to convey his best wishes to a woman in labour. When he arrives, he meets a bunch of drunk medical students who make callous remarks that make him uncomfortable; after some time, the nurse comes in and announces that the woman successfully gave birth, which relieves Bloom's anxiety. In addition to these simple events, the chapter tells the entire history of England. That is, the first paragraph is written in monosyllabic Druidic calls, the second approximates the style of ancient Latin historians, the third glides into early Anglo-Saxon poetry ("before born babe bliss had"), then it switches to Chaucer and medieval prose, and so on, the style of each paragraph moving a little bit forward in history, until it collapses into a mix of modern slang in the end.
Thus, in numerous prose styles, the chapter recreates the birth and life of the English language itself, without warning the reader that it's doing this. In essence, it shows the history of a whole civilization in an original way. But the important part is, it never stops making sense; the plot and the dialogue keep progressing along with the style. Thus, the birth of a child is shown alongside the birth of the whole English language, indicating that civilization is born anew with every new human being. An ordinary birth is made to look like the culmination of all of English history, thanks entirely to this method of describing it. You don't have to have read Chaucer and Shakespeare and Gibbon to appreciate this chapter; Joyce read them for you, so all you have to do is watch the language change.
This happens all the time throughout the book. For instance, chapter 13 finds Bloom wandering around on a beach, where some teenage girls are hanging out and talking. Without further ado, the book inserts itself into the mind of one of these girls. Her thoughts aren't anything amazing: basically, she just wants to fall in love with a handsome man, be loved in return, and be happy. However, in describing these thoughts, Joyce adopts the style of a dime-store romantic novel of the sort that are marketed to teenage girls: it's rife with sentimental, flowery prose like "the summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace." The thing is, this style accurately reflects what folks go through during their teenage years: it's got the same heightened emotion, the same vague yearning, the same feeling one gets when falling in love for the first time, that this has never before happened to anyone else and will never happen again, the same romanticism and idealism. Thus, it's remarkably easy to sympathize with the girl, again solely due to Joyce's technique.
That's probably the biggest reason to read Ulysses: all these styles and epic analogies are founded on a powerful emotional centre. Some folks like to say that this book is a "celebration of life," or something to that effect. Well, in my opinion, it's a book about loneliness more than anything else. A large part of the book consists of Bloom's internal monologues, creating the impression that he's constantly hounded by unwelcome thoughts. When he's not running into hostile nationalists or petty gossips, he thinks about his adulterous wife. Then, in chapter 14, he meets Stephen Dedalus, decides to follow him out of the maternity ward and into the red light district, and then brings him home. Bloom, whose own son died eleven days after being born, feels fatherly affection toward Stephen; yet, Bloom and Stephen have nothing to say to each other. They engage in some small talk, but Stephen clearly doesn't take Bloom seriously, and Bloom doesn't really know how to approach Stephen. Then, Stephen, who is the closest thing to a friend that Bloom has met all day, leaves. Bloom goes upstairs and goes to sleep next to his wife; the final chapter is told from his wife's point of view, and it becomes abundantly obvious that her perception of her own husband is often wrong, and always strangely detached, as if he's not close to her at all despite living under the same roof. The style is breathtaking, rhythmic stream-of-consciousness, highlighting the sadness of this emotional distance between the characters.
So, don't feel threatened by the style. Ulysses is very readable; true, each chapter has its own style, but most of the styles are perfectly accessible, and make the plot more engaging. All the "difficult" parts don't happen until the second half, giving you time to get accustomed to Joyce's idiosyncrasies (he doesn't tell you when he's moving from objective description to internal monologue, but after a while, you can usually tell). Just you try it on.
Rating:
Summary: Over Rated Sensationalism
Review: It was later said when Joyce was dead and buried that he had confessed to a close friend that "Uylsses" was a complete fabricated joke that he used to get revenge at the world with. He was drunk most of the time he had put pen to paper and he threw so much of the text out that its suprising that most people hold this pretentious amateurish work as the greatest novel of the last one hundred years. The prose is vague, uninspiring and chatoic, there is no plot line what-so-ever, it's just a meandering stream of undelicate and unsophisticated garble from a minor artist.
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