Ron Rosenbaum gets real on James Joyce's "masterpiece":
Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they've wasted reading it. … The thing that's so galling is, of course, that all Joyce's tired and antiquated modernist tricks had long been anticipated by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, that amazing 18th-century novel that eclipses Ulysses in every way and shows how we've lowered the bar for anointing innovative literary "geniuses" ever since.
I have to say I have tried reading Ulysses several times and had exactly the same reaction every time. And that's the thing about "difficult" art. It's often, though not always, a synonym for bad. My own personal breaking of this rule: T.S. Eliot.
The Dish 