It’s O.K. to admit it: You tried to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and ended up chucking the thing aside in frustration. You are not alone. According to her letters, Virginia Woolf (“Never did I read such tosh”) had a long stall after 200 pages. Several well-known authors in the Book Review’s By the Book interview feature admit to leaving the novel unfinished. “Ulysses” even notched the No. 3 spot in the Top Five Abandoned Classics poll published by the Goodreads site a few years ago.

Yet it nags at you. You don’t like to quit, but need a nudge to wade back into the novel’s overflowing streams of character consciousness, arcane references and shifting structure to follow those people going about life in Dublin on June 16, 1904.

Thankfully, the original 1922 edition is in the public domain and technically diverse artists have taken up the challenge of freshly interpreting “Ulysses” to make it more accessible to a wider audience.

For starters, you can ease into the novel’s language by physically pulling apart Joyce’s sentences in the touch-screen puzzler He Liked Thick Word Soup (free for Android and iOS; ). The game invites players to put their fingers on the screen and untangle knots of sentences from “Ulysses” to match up repeated words. When all the words are paired, another line from the novel appears and the game advances.