Ulysses is centered around Odysseus so having read that first would greatly improve your experience with the book.

there is no magical ladder to being able to understand books, dont waste time reading stuff youre not interested in so you'll 'acquire' the reading capability

just read the book carefully, analyze, take notes if you have to, it's not that hard

>>7710011
>Falling for the "start with the Greeks meme"
Just read CoL49 before GR, you'll be fine. You do have to read the entirety of the western canon before attempting Ulysses though.

>>7710075
I tend to agree with this view, but be open to rereading books after having read what people consider to be the prerequisites. Age combined with more knowledge almost always adds new depth to old works.

For example, I started philosophy by copying pages of Nietzsche when I was about 11 years old (long story), but I didn't return to him until I was 25. I knew he was a genius reading him at 11, but at 25 I can have a much greater respect for his ambition, his arrogance, the lyrical sublimeness of his work. It's almost like going through photos of your childhood.

OP, you're going to get some strange responses in here. Ulysses is incredibly hard, and overwrought, and self-indulgent. It contains some of the best in all of literature, but it is far from perfect, and further from readable.

Gravity's Rainbow is, in my opinion, much more readable. Take notes and use a scene guide.

Or, of course, just read the rest of the classics, of which there are years of reading awaiting you, before trying to apprehend the most difficult book on the planet.

Some literature is hard to understand. Rilke, Dickinson, Stevens - these are all phenomenal writers, whose most challenging work requires a gifted mind to appreciate. Harold Bloom has admitted to getting headaches at times when teaching Dickinson's poetry at Yale.

the tl;dr is, no, don't start with the greeks, but do start with the classics, and discipline your reading mind before approaching the final bosses of literature.

Also, Finnegans Wake is garbage by any standard other than sheer appreciation for the writer's style and intelligence, and I wish I'd stop reading about that book on here.

>>7710255
>any standard other than sheer appreciation for the writer's style and intelligence,

>implying any other standards matter

>>7710260
>he is so full of himself that he cannot appreciate plot as the end-all

>>7710260
even though this is a meme, i'll replace "style" from my former post with "technical skill".