So I doubt I'm going to be able to say anything original about this book, plenty of people cleverer than me have puzzled over it before and all I can hope is that some of them were similarly confused.

It's tempting to accuse Joyce of simply being a troll; creating the most obtuse, profound- seeming nonsense of a book and then laughing at the thought of people trying to figure it out. But even taken as that it's impressive. You need an immense knowledge of the English language to run it through the woodchipper like this, and that's without touching on the various allegories.

As it quickly became apparent how impenetrable I was going to find the book, I decided that this first reading was just going to be for 'the feel'. I wasn't going to look up references, translations or even worry too much if I got muddled about the characters. Even with that there were a lot of sentences and paragraphs I had to reread several times just to get the gist of what was going on, but some of the prose is quite poetic or funny so I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy parts. But it was definitely a struggle. I did look up a few words, but mainly when I started to feel he was just inventing them. 

Now that I've absorbed some of the book, by osmosis it feels, I will in future (when I feel up to it) reread and be ready to look up references and dig a bit deeper into it.