I can't believe how angry some get if they don't find a book "easy". If you don't understand Ulysses, you should listen to it on tape; there is an excellent professional version I have heard, but you'd have to listen around for a voice (or voices; the one I heard has a reader, a character voice and also a woman who does Molly in the last chapter). You really are doing yourself a dis-service if you do not dedicate the time to really digesting this book. Granted, a lot of it is a humor that modern Americans who haven't read widely wouldn't find funny, but the wit of the characters (Joyce, in other words) and the incredible, complex, true-to-life depth of the inner workings of thought, of conversation and personalities is so unique. The allusions and the references are not necessary to understand entirely if it's too much for you, but there is no other book like this, no richer, more up-lifting or understanding book than this is literature, period. If you believe a person has to have a PhD to understand or enjoy this, as one worthy gentleman so eloquently put it, I think on the contrary you'd have to be a TV sitcom addict not to see the beauty in this book, let alone to be angry that you couldn't "get it".