Yes! You only need one reason to read Ulysses: You'll enjoy it, if you let yourself. Ulysses is hilarious, moving, and thought-provoking, all at the same time.

Yes! You only need one reason to read Ulysses: You'll enjoy it, if you let yourself. Ulysses is hilarious, moving, and thought-provoking, all at the same time. But if you're afraid of it -- if you're afraid of missing a reference, of not appreciating the mise-en-scène of turn-of-the-century Ireland, of somehow not "understanding" the Homeric scaffolding or the rest of the book – then you won't enjoy it, and maybe literature isn't for you. I know kids in their early teens who've loved Ulysses because they don't have these fears, don't see reading as something they can fail at. They can't fail at it because literature isn't reducible to being "understood," therefore not reducible to being "misunderstood." You wouldn't talk about music in terms of its understandability[1], at least not entirely, and you shouldn't approach literature that way either. All that said, if you want another reason to read Ulysses, do it because it will force you to read and think about writing and language and people in a different way, and that different way is a tool you really ought to have in your toolbox. Which is to say, reading Ulysses can also be worthwhile in the same way that learning a functional programming language is. 1. And for anyone who hasn't really studied music, you'd be amazed by the number of references you're missing there, too. You just don't notice and don't care because those references aren't essential, which is true of Ulysses as well.