An Irish Music 
 I was inspired to give Ulysses another try after reading Bartholomew Gill's The Death of a Joyce Scholar, a detective story whose plot is closely tied to Joyce's great novel. One of Gill's characters gives the advice to let the words flow like music, over you and through you, and not to get hung up in the details. Good advice, I found. If read quickly in this way, Ulysses is more mesmerizing than it mystifies, and constantly exhilarating despite its occasional tendency to exasperate. I fully expect that a second reading will require a full summer rather than a mere week, and demand the use of a dictionary, a map, and a detailed reader's guide, but a first pass without any of these can still bring enormous pleasure. 
 I did find it almost impossible, however, to read for plot. Although the events in Ulysses are rather simple and are confined to a single day (Thursday, June 16, 1904), so much is told in flashback or in the imagination that it becomes hard to separate the various strands. I found it helpful to refer to the online Cliff Notes after reading each chapter just to confirm what I thought had happened. And, in real terms, nothing much does. Two men, the young intellectual Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego from 
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 
 ) and the fortyish Jewish salesman Leopold Bloom, wake up, leave the house, wander around Dublin for most of the day, crossing paths occasionally, only to come together towards the end of the book and part again before the story ends in the small hours of the following morning. But the plot is only one of several threads that Joyce uses to organize a novel that contains as much of life as he can cram into it; among the other devices that shape the book are parallels with the Odyssey, the geography of Dublin, an almost Freudian penetration into the psyche of his characters, an ever-deepening humanity, and a large-scale structural organization akin to the movements and thematic connections within a piece of music. 
 Joyce's language is musical too, and should probably be heard rather than read. His set-pieces--such as Molly Bloom's famous erotic soliloquy in the Penelope chapter [18] that closes the book, Leopold Bloom's parallel fantasy at the end of Nausicaa [13], the Viceregal procession at the end of Wandering Rocks [10], or the numerous passages of Homeric invocation that punctuate Cyclops [12]--show his magical ability to weave a spell with words and his exuberant delight in doing so. But there is no single Joycean style; one of the joys of Ulysses is that each chapter introduces a distinct style of its own. The classical passages in Cyclops [12] are answered by long early-British sections in Oxen of the Sun [14] in which no Latinate words are used whatsoever. The intellectual legerdemain of some of the Stephen Dedalus chapters is balanced by the down-to-earth barroom conversations of Leopold Bloom's friends. At different times, Joyce uses the language of magazine stories, the Catholic Church, political rhetoric, or scholastic debate. He includes densely-argued prose, free verse, snippets in six or seven languages (Ulysses is not merely Irish but cosmopolitan), quotations from opera and street songs, and even two pages of musical notation! Wandering Rocks [10] is composed of brief fragments, like verbal snapshots of Dublin at a particular moment. Ithaca [17] is cast in the form of a catechism that addresses subjective emotional issues with the detailed objectivity of scientific analysis. Circe [15], the longest chapter of all, is a masochistic nightmare written in the form of a play script, or rather a movie scenario years ahead of its time. 
 More than anything else, I found myself reading Ulysses for the sheer delight of its many styles, and hugely enjoying even those parts that I didn't understand. There are many more treasures to be found in the book, I am sure, but this was more than enough for a start!