Socialize the process. Students might want to consider gathering together to read aloud selected passages from every few hundred pages. This is an incentive to read the inbetween parts. And if travel time and space considerations deflect from possible meet ups, there is the marvellous teleconference mode.

Don't read at home. Now, mind you, I read Underworld in Brno, so my initial flippant advice was going to be "go to the Czech Republic and be bored." But the principle's the same -- don't sit down at the desk where you do your other homework or lie down on your bed in your dorm room intending to grind out your page quota. Get up, and go to a specific place that you've chosen as your reading place -- library, coffee shop, student center. Come home when you're done.

My obsession with studying in coffee shops started in undergrad, when I had a Faerie Queene seminar that required me to read six cantos of FQ a week. (It's a lot when you're a junior in college.) I always went down to the Haymarket, which was my favorite coffee shop, and which by the end of the semester felt like the "reading Faerie Queene place" even if I went in there to do something else.

Both good suggestions, thanks.

Last time I read it, in a class on the historical novel at Boston University, we read Ulysses beforehand. That's a good technique - like swinging three bats before you step up to the plate with one.

So I should have assigned another novel, almost as long, first?

Sadist.

My Dickens students are about to embark on a six-week romp through Dombey & Son, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit (900-1000 pages, all), thanks to their idiot professor's conviction that the number of additional students who will finish a Victorian novel drops to zero after two weeks.

Just remind your students that there are always others worse off.

I agree with Nick -- they just won't get the allusions if they don't read Ulysses first. Other than that, I'd say to spend the first couple hundred pages soaking it in rather than following characters -- I've heard some people say they're disappointed that so many characters turn up and then fade away. It's a book in which the characters are a part of the setting, and the setting is usually the protagonist. Actually ,in all seriousness, the "Wandering Rocks" section of Ulysses helped me to read Underworld.