I absolutely love Dubliners and reread it every few years. I was deeply impressed by Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I read it as a high-school student, but have not returned to it as frequently as I have to the short stories.

I was unable to "get into" Ulysses when assigned during college, although I faked my way through discussions, papers, and tests and was able to score "A"s based upon my reading about the book rather than reading the actual book itself. (My sources included, but were not limited to, "Cliff Notes"; I found reputable academic criticism in the library to supplement my research.)

I stumbled across a paperback Ulysses at someone's garage sale years later, maybe during my 30s or so, and eventually read the whole thing. I was impressed of course, but did not really enjoy it.

I've glanced over FW and well as Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, but do not have the slightest inclination to spend any of my time trying to wade through that particular text!

James Joyce was obviously a highly talented writer and a genius of some kind or another, but I don't see eye-to-eye with his compulsion to become more and more obscure as time went on, eventually more-or-less creating his own private language. I believe that an artist should be trying to communicate to his audience, not to confound them or dare them to puzzle out his intentions.

Different readers apparently "draw the line" at different points along the scale of Joycean obscurity. I believe that of the many folks who are very enthusiastic about Ulysses, most will go that far with JJ but no further, they're willing to leave Finnegans Wake alone. I'm a little less tolerant of Joyce's linguistic game-playing than the true lovers of Ulysses, and I think he would have left us a much greater literary legacy if he had stuck with relatively straightforward style of his earlier works, which were of course very great in their own right.

I think that much of the cultish devotion to James Joyce involves love of Ireland and pride in Irishness more than any purely literary motivation. I can say that, because I have the same weakness myself. I probably would not have made the effort I did to plumb the depths of Ulysees if the author were English or of any other nationality. If the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, say, or the Argentinian Borges, were as deliberately obscure as Joyce, I doubt seriously that I would ever have read and enjoyed their momumental works.