How to begin: When I feel my enthusiasm flagging for a book, I Google "What's so great about [the book's title]" and often find someone's appreciation provides new encouragement to keep going. This Ted-Ed video by Sam Slote, on the subject of Ulysses, is excellent.
A few quotes:
It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of a rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable. (p 533)
What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood.
What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow? (p 789)
Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and afterwards seconded by the father? Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.
With what success had he attempted direct instruction? She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest, comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated with error.
Further thoughts: Ulysses is everywhere. I smiled when listening to Orwell's Roses in which Solnit quotes a letter he wrote to a girlfriend beginning with "Have you read Ulysses yet?" I don't read the books on this list in order to analyze them too closely. (There's How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton in PDF format for that!) I read them to see what I notice. I like how Francine Prose writes "to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another (...) will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art." And so, while there are many guides to help with reading Ulysses, (including a map drawn by Nabokov) I prefered just jumping in and letting the experience wash over me.