Raising a pint of Guinness or listening to a good Irish band might be simpler than slogging through James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

The book has a reputation among college undergraduates everywhere as an impenetrable tome, a sure candidate for Cliff’s Notes.

Even Kansas University English professor Katie Conrad, who specializes in Irish literature, didn’t make it through the first time.

“I have a tattered copy and the first time I honestly made it all the way through was an all-night reading about 14 years ago,” she says. “I was supposed to have read it all the way through before.”

It’s not an easy read, Conrad admits, but it’s a rewarding one. And for those who have tried and failed to scale the intimidating walls of Joyce’s masterpiece — widely considered one of the top 10 great works of literature in the English language — Conrad has a solution: a marathon public reading.

“I think it’s a great book to read collaboratively,” she says. “It’s a book that has many voices, and so reading it with other people and talking about it with other people helps you to interact with those voices.”

The 28-hour-plus recitation in downtown Lawrence is open to everyone and will cap off “Joyce’s Ireland: A Celebration of the Bloomsday Centenary,” a weeklong celebration of Irish culture organized by Conrad to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the day on which “Ulysses” is set: June 16, 1904.

The novel follows an ordinary Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, as he lives out a single day, hour-by-hour. Joyce paints a vivid picture of the Irish city, naming streets, shops, pubs, churches and other urban identifiers. Bloomsday has become an annual celebration among Joyce fans in at least 60 countries. In Dublin, where the official centenary celebration has been dubbed “ReJoyce Dublin 2004,” aficionados often re-enact Bloom’s itinerary across the city.

But the location is not terribly vital to celebrating Joyce’s work, Conrad says.

“Part of the reason we’ve called this thing ‘Joyce’s Ireland’ is because Joyce wrote this in exile. He was not in Dublin when he wrote it,” she says. “So his Ireland is an Ireland of the imagination, which means it can be recreated, but it can be recreated in Lawrence just as easily as it can anywhere else.”

Other events include a two-day mini-conference with regional and national scholars; Irish music at area pubs; a lecture on the representation of the Irish in the early 20th century by Conrad; a performance of “Tristan and Iseult,” a story from which Joyce drew inspiration, presented by Lawrence storyteller Priscilla Howe; a film screening on the KU campus; a display of Joyce materials at KU’s Spencer Research Library; and a free staged reading of Don Nigro’s irreverent play “Lucia Mad” by English Alternative Theatre.

Free lectures by two internationally known Joyce scholars, professor Vicki Mahaffey of the University of Pennsylvania and professor Michael Patrick Gillespie of Marquette University, are intended for the general public and will be followed by receptions and music.

“I think those talks, for the general public, they give you a preview of why Joyce matters and why in general imagination matters,” Conrad says.

“I think he is often cited as being important because he’s difficult, because he broke a lot of new ground in terms of style and form, and while that’s interesting, I don’t think that’s necessarily the only or the most important thing about what he’s done.

“What I think he’s valuable for is helping us to be conscious of the importance of language and the importance of the imagination. He does it in a way that is ultimately quite fun, and that’s what I think gets missed. It certainly was missed by me when I was an undergrad sitting alone reading the book.”