Ulysses : a critical and synoptic edition

What can I say about such a mind-blowing book? I could barely decide how many stars I would give it since it divided my opinion so. No wonder it's so controversial. There were a few chapters I absolutely hated (Scylla and Charbidis anyone?) and I thought I would end up disliking Joyce too for inflicting some of it and being such an arrogant know everything at times. Yet I find myself admiring him a great deal and wanting to re-read the book at some point if only to try and make some more sense of it. The technique astonishes, but I can't give it a glowing review because frankly I didn't like it that much. It grated in parts. Maybe that's why it's so revered though, and why I wanted to read it again, because it challenges in a way that very few other books manage.

I'd like to read it with some proper guides handy so that I don't have to keep flipping to the end notes. Nevertheless, I've found some good guides online.

Anyway, it got three stars in the end. I won't be going around boasting I've read it or attending the next Bloom's day, but I am glad to have read it and to have finished it, as I think if I'd given up half-way through I wouldn't have ever read it or finished it in the future. Glad to have read it in the version I did as well, the free ebook was apparently broken! Also, it had been edited. I know the text I read was full of a lot of mistakes (it was the 1922 version), but I'd rather that than something that has been edited in too heavy-handed a way.