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I gave it a go back in college, but didn't get far, even with the help of a skeleton key. I tried it because it was reputed to be "hard". But making a bunch of references to things / people / places I never had a hope of knowing about makes it more "obscure" than "hard" in my book.

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I remember reading the first few chapters of Ulysses in a high school English class. Our teacher explained that there are entire Masters-level classes on just this book.

When we dug into the text, though, the difficulty was, as you said, just a ton of things we hadn't heard of. Compared to philosophy courses or some CS algorithms — or even wrapping my head around pointers for the first time — the concepts were pretty straight-forward.

I'd be curious to hear how either "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake" compare to Samuel Delany's "Dhalgren". I've yet to read anything by Joyce, but thanks to the University of Adelaide[1] and European (and Australian) copyright terms, I now have both in epub-format, and in my reading queue.

[1] https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/

"Dhalgren" -- what? Why? What do you think are the links between such vastly different works, produced in vastly different eras by authors who could hardly be more unlike each other? Seriously, I'd love to know how you'd relate them.

There are structural similarities between Finnegan's Wake and Dhalgren because both are circular stories where the end joins up with the beginning.

Others have commented on a description of the literal style/structure of "Dhalgren" that "it sounds a bit like 'Ulysses'". I suppose I'll know once I finish the books by Joyce :-)

Why is "hard" a good thing?

People enjoy overcoming challenges. (People also like to brag.)

Sometimes (but not always), "hard" when applied to literature means thought-provoking and perspective-expanding. Those are good things. Never read this one though, so I'm not sure whether it's "hard" in that sense.

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