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I just finished my fifth reading of Ulysses and I think it would be absurd to try to review it in the usual sense, I'm not going to try. It's the best novel I've read and I very much doubt there's a better one out there waiting for me to discover - it's a titanic achievement on every level, and in many ways continues to define our current conception of what a novel is, or at least should be, and how it should function.

Having become deeply familiar with the book over the years, I have gotten to the point where I can simply read it for enjoyment. I don't know every detail, but I know which chapter is which, and I know about the horse race, and who the nymph is in the Calypso episode, and about the drowned man in the harbor, and why Dedalus loathes Haines, and most of the other details that puzzle readers on their first or third read-through, and I can tell you it's a great place to be, because this novel is stuffed through with simple delights when you don't constantly have to interject your hard interpretive work over the basic experience of reading.

As other critics have pointed out, despite its experimentalism and stylistic audacity, at heart Ulysses is a simple naturalist novel about a couple of people and their very human, very understandable dilemmas, and this, I think, is absolutely vital to its continued reception. I would compare this favorably, for example, to Gravity's Rainbow, which in my reading, at least, is populated by grotesques and rarely contains any moments of real human feeling, because it is at such demonstrative lengths to keep itself, and its reader, at arm's length from the material. Not that Pynchon is incapable of human feeling - I think he found a better way in Mason & Dixon, for example - but simply to illustrate my point. I can't imagine how any reader could come away without being profoundly moved by certain details, such as Leopold's profound grief over the death of his infant son, little Rudy, and how that shows up for him, such as in the Circe episode.

This is the kind of book you can profitably read many times not only because it is fun, fascinating, hilarious, occasionally maddening, and continually brilliant, but because it occupies so many possible points of view. The last time I went through it, for example, I was struck by how much my own frame of reference and primary sympathies had shifted over the years from Dedalus to Bloom.

I consider this the greatest novel written, and esteem Joyce among the very greatest artists of the world tradition, on the level of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. This is a once-in-a-thousand-years kind of book.