By the standards of the time it was written, it contains pornographic elements, but most folks wouldn't understand that's what they were reading, if they even got past the first 20 pages.

This is a brilliant work, arguably the greatest novel in English of the 20th century. Banning it would be roughly akin to banning Hamlet. (Which I'm sure is on some goober's list)

Only the intellectually feeble would challenge or ban this book.

One thing to keep in mind when reading Joyce, or any difficult author is to be aware of a sense of humor in the writing. Joyce is hilarious in nearly all of his works. Finnigans Wake is both obscene, brilliant, full of humor - and, yes, almost impossible to penetrate - but it's worth the effort. Sometimes readers approach a 'monumental' work with a sense of seriousness that is more tiring and off-putting than just reading the book. I feel that attitude of oh this is a serious book, I had better be serious. keeps a lot of readers from having fun. Proust is another author that has a great sense of humor and light-heartedness weaving in and out of the pages of his humongous novel. No, it's not always knee-slapping humor, but it can bring a smile or a chuckle from the reader and it's then one feels that the author is talking to you.

I've read this twice. The first time I was very young and bedwildered (and more than a little intimidated by it. The second time was years later and I was very impressed with both the story and the mind that created it.

Most intelligent and reasonable people would be able to recognize the artistic merit in Joyce's use of profanity and contraversial themes. Joyce was a genius and a literary titan, so it's not as if he was trying to be sensational in order to sell books. People who are not intelligent and reasonable enough to appreciate this would not get more than five pages into this novel, as it's notoriously difficult to read even with the aid of a dictionary and a set of encyclopedias.

A great book. Originally it was banned for its sexual content (the Circe/Nighttown scene in particular, a drunken, hallucinatory episode in which Bloom visits a whorehouse and has some rather interesting adventures). When the word f*ck appers for the first time it is more than 500 pages into the book, and it hits you with considerable force: in fact, violence immediately ensues, in the book. Ulysses is fun to read but it is helpful to be familiar with the original Odyssey, and it doesn't hurt to have a dictionary and encyclopedia handy.