Rank Ulysses' chapters from most difficult to easiest to comprehend

in some kind of order -

NOT REALLY REWARDING ENOUGH FOR ITS ANNOYINGNESS:
Proteus.

GRASPABLE IF COMPLICATED AND AT ANY RATE PROBABLY WORTH IT ALTHOUGH ACTUALLY A BIT LABORED ONCE YOU LOOK AT IT AGAIN:
Oxen.

STRAIGHTFORWARD ENOUGH BUT BLOODY DULL ANYWAY:
Eumaeus.

LATIN ALREADY?
Telemachus.

I DO NOT KNOW ANY OF THESE GODFORSAKEN SONGS:
Sirens.

SHRIVELLED WHAT?
Calypso.

I DO NOT KNOW WHO ANY OF THESE PEOPLE ARE:
Hades.

AT LEAST I KNOW WHAT HE'S GOING ON ABOUT:
Nestor.

I THINK I START TO GET IT NOW:
Lotus-Eaters.

AT THIS POINT ONE MIGHT WISH TO BREAK FOR A SNACK:
Lestrygonians.

PERFECTLY STRAIGHTFORWARD:
Wandering Rocks.

HONESTLY, I CAN'T SEE THE DIFFICULTY:
Scylla & Charybdis.

PRETTY DAMNED COMPREHENSIBLE, SAYS PUBLIC:
Aeolus.

UNALLOYED JOY, SO IT IS:
Cyclops.

A BIT TOO OBVIOUS, FRANKLY:
Nausicaa.

CAKEWALK:
Ithaca.

LIKE A BLOODY GILBERT AND SULLIVAN PLAY:
Circe.

SHE DOES GO ON A BIT, I GUESS:
Penelope.

Nestor is way harder than Telemachus!

But, this is a great post.

Ehh, I would put Nestor right at the bottom beside Nausicaa. I think that tom's list was fairly accurate, although I can't remember the last two episodes well enough to comment on those yet. And I would put Scylla near the top, of course.

Take out that "of course". I don't think I've commented on Scylla on these boards before, so I don't know why I assumed that you guys would know what I was talking about. I agree with Mr. Moore, however, that it is a difficult chapter.

I just finished, but I had help from Blamires and Burgess. The first chapters are difficult because it takes a while to find Joyce's rhythms, and so much is allusion and metaphor that without help it's easy to get lost. They are, however, short. Scylla, Sirens, Oxen are tough even with help. By the Wandering Rocks i was only using the guides to help with the nuances, and only found Circe to be daunting because of its relative length. By Ithaca i was longing for Scylla again, missing the wordplay, but using its momentum to breeze through Penelope, which is quite easy by then.
"Unsheath your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through space smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is just a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past."

I am pretty sure I understand all of that without a guide, got any others?

Difficultest - Night Town.

Tom,
I didn't particularly choose that passage , from Scylla and Charybdis, for its difficulty. I chose it because it represents what I enjoyed most from Ulysses, and it comes from a difficult episode. I speak only for myself (and who shouldn't) when I say I don't think I would have had the patience to get the enjoyment out of the difficult chapters had I not had the guides. By the second half of the book I felt I had the gist of most passages, but reading Blamires, for good or for bad, showed me how many other layers of meaning Joyce put into almost every word, in some cases. I'm sure i could have gotten through the entire book without ever noticing that Bloom is sometimes Moses, sometimes Jesus, sometimes the'holy spirit', and that Stephen is sometimes Hamlet, sometimes Jesus, sometimes Harry Potter, but it was kind of fun having had the elucidation early on and then having a few 'I get it!' moments that I would not have gotten otherwise.