Joyce never intended for the book to only be read by university professors - he was a man of the people and intended for the book to be read by ordinary people. Still a guide is kinda necessary when tackling it.
Ironically (intentionally?), Joyce simultaneously wrote wonderfully for the spoken word form, but insisted on typography that makes who’s saying what often obscure.
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2022/0610/1146705-listen-ulysses-...
frank delaney did short podcasts every week where he went through a few lines at a time. he never got to finish the full book unfortunately but its what i usually recommend to people because its very casual and easy to listen to
Honestly, he intended the work to be read aloud publicly, in the same vein of epic storytelling as The Odyssey. There's even a recording of him reading a few pages, it's absolutely mesmerizing: https://youtu.be/ZhW0TrzWGmI
I've always disagreed with this idea that you need a "guide" to read some books. Guided reading inspires a specific reading of the book, which may not always be the reading that speaks most to the reader. To me it's equivalent to taking a walk with a geologist, or a biologist, through a natural park. While you will certainly see aspects you would not have picked up without them, you may expend so much absorbing these specifics that you neglect the aspects that speak most to you.
In university, I remember many professors dismissing some of my favorite books as "requiring guidance" to read. The thinly veiled implication was that they were lost on me. Which is rather silly. Instead of looking for the specific academic aspects of the books (which were indeed lost on me, and still are), the aspects of the books which I took the most away from were non-academic.