If you're going to read [b:Ulysses|338798|Ulysses|James Joyce|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1428891345s/338798.jpg|2368224], you want at least one good reference nearby. There is a lot of good information available online, and I definitely spent a lot of time searching online for translations and clues at understanding references, but The New Bloomsday Book is a very helpful guide to have at your fingertips for its concise summaries of each chapter.

There were a lot of times I wished the book went into more depth than it did, but if it had I probably would have been frustrated at how long each chapter was, so I can't complain too much that I didn't always get as much detail as I wanted from The New Bloomsday Book. A couple people in my Ulysses reading group were using [b:Ulysses Annotated|10543|Ulysses Annotated|Don Gifford|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1166254003s/10543.jpg|13227] as their companion book, and I think having both reference books available would be a great way to approach Ulysses since they are so different in their methods of helping the reader make sense of this complex and confusing book.