Recently, and over a span of a few weeks, I read Ulysses by James Joyce. This was one of the stranger books to cross my path; it's the kind of book that might make you want to reread it a couple of times in order to gain a better appreciation of Joyce's effort. On the other hand, it might make you want to forget the whole thing altogether and, instead, try reading something easy, like Kant's Prolegomena.
Ulysses starts out in a pretty straightforward style, but quickly decompensates into nothing particularly resembling a novel. Each chapter is written in different fashion; sometimes a more traditional narrative and sometimes the perspective is whatever happens to be floating through a character's head.
Some people might want to ask, "what's the book about?" Beats the heck out of me, however, the short answer is here. Like some other things, everyone has an opinion. One of the more unique may be a little analysis I came across by Kime Rasha:
Please consider why Bloom is worried about Stephen going out with plump overweight "Buck" and why would they urinate in the garden together? Then Bloom invites him to spend the night. The brothel seems a cover for Bloom, or perhaps even a test for Stephen, ie Bloom is checking out his theory that Stephen may be "sort of available for action", so to speak. One who is living a double life can never be too careful. He risks the danger of exposing proclivities to one who might tell.
The fact that he is married and goes to the beach to view and suffer the consequences, persumably still in public, just goes to show you he is probably too "into himself" to go after the unobtainable opposite gender. Why, with his dear sweet Molly adoringly waiting at home, does he need to travel around looking for adventure and answer anon love letters sent to himself as a "Flower"? Perhaps Judge Woolsey was too naive to catch the underlying theme of Ulysses. And why the title of the book...is Joyce saying, "I know why men really set out to sea and spend so much time away from their wives, in the company of ..."
For a more conventional analysis you may want to consider spending time at The Internet Ulysses by James Joyce. It seems that there are folks with plenty of time on their hands along with a propensity for the obscure leading them to spend entire lives investigating and wondering about Joyce's esoterica. Their peculiar bent becomes our gain as we are thus able to glean insight from learned study. But, for me, it is not so much an interest in speculating anent the "man in the mac" or the age of Gerty MacDowell, but, rather, what we usually call the theme of the book. Opinions vary, I suppose, however I'm thinking that Joyce's thrust was an elucidation and deconstruction of time. Obviously the action per se isn't particularly interesting; most of it is banal. No matter because, in fine, the storyline (or plot) remains external and, in a way, insignificant to the presentation of the action. The time of the action is profoundly psychological, yet unlike, say, Proust, whose character's psychology is elucidated painstakingly with detailed narrative, for Joyce psychic characterizations are presented bare, out in the open, and exposed without any unified narrative.
My advice to anyone first attempting to read the thing would be to begin with a concordance. The above linked Internet site makes a pretty good companion and guidebook for a literature that at times can come across as pretty baroque.