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The singer asked the crowd - "how many of your have read James Joyce?"

He had just sang Whiskey in the Jar and was queuing up to sing Finnegan's Wake, he was setting the stage for his next song. A few hands went up, mine among them. We were in The Merry Ploughman's Pub in South Dublin and the crowd was having a good time, singing and drinking Guiness from pint glasses.

"Now, how many understood what you read?" The crowd laughed and half as many hands stayed up and I realized my extended arm wavered some too.

I have looked at Ulysses over the years like it was a high and formidable mountain to climb. I have picked it up several times over the years, weighed it, set it beside the phone book and compared width. I have scanned the pages and noticed with alarm a painful lack of punctuation, and not the Cormac McCarthy kind of simplicity; but run on sentences, stream of consciousness. I have avoided the The Sound and the Fury for the same reason, finally giving up on that. Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? was a morass of nonsense that I slogged through to the end, but it was a relatively short book.

And then there is the length. Formidable. I read through War and Peace, in awe of its epic stature, and I finished Atlas Shrugged out of sheer inertia and also out of a morbid curiosity to see it through. Ulysses was long and in stream of consciousness prose.

And so the years went by and I could not bring myself to begin the climb, did not feel up to sloshing through the swamp of adjectives and relentless narration.

When I did finally begin, I was pleasantly surprised.

The stream of consciousness technique was not overwhelming, was not the nonsensical morass of Mailer nor the cacophony of thought from Faulkner. Joyce’s language is rich and engaging, his storytelling modern and experimental but still approachable. There were moments that I was in love with the book, believing this was the greatest novel I had ever read, I was convinced of Joyce’s brilliance and inspired by his genius. It is funny, profane, irreverent, even shocking. The references to classic literature, especially the parallels with Homer makes it worthy of a greater review than I can come up with. Molly Bloom's lengthy soliloquy at the end is a gem of vulgarity and human observation. Other times I was simply reading to get through, keeping a runner’s pace through the long back miles and steep hills of a marathon.

Ultimately, this is a masterpiece, a great work in the English language or of any language, literature of the highest order. But it can be difficult, in its length and its narration, and Joyce asks a lot of his reader, his prose is steeped in his own erudition and he makes little attempt to step it down. But for the reader who makes it to the top, it is a great view from the summit.