The book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake

November 13, 2023 5:55 PM

“I don’t want to lie, it wasn’t like I saw God,” Fialka said, of reaching the book’s end. “It wasn’t a big deal.” “When people hear you’ve been a member of a book club that reads the same book every time you meet, most people go, ‘Why would you do that?’” said Bruce Woodside, a 74-year-old retired Disney animator who joined Fialka’s reading group in the 1990s. Though “it’s 628 pages of things that look like typographic errors”, said Woodside, who has been reading and re-reading Finnegans Wake since his late teens. “There’s a kind of visionary quality to it.”
posted by j.r (14 comments total)

I was part of a Finnegans Wake group in Berkeley back in the 90’s for a few years. They had been going for twenty years or more before I joined. A really wonderful experience with great people and a book I have been reading since I was 14. Read it through three times and still open it up to explore its cosmos.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:03 PM on November 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

That sounds really sweet.

Now I'm remembering the late Robert Anton Wilson's love of the Wake.

And me, reading some of it out loud to people on acid.
posted by doctornemo at 6:56 PM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I admire people who can do this, it sounds like pure torture to me. I need to work on letting go of my belief that I need to understand something to enjoy it.
posted by waving at 3:40 AM on November 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd love to do this! Reading Ulysses was such a great ride that tackling Finnegan's Wake actually sounds like fun to me.
posted by vacapinta at 3:57 AM on November 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

"reaching the book's end" — but as the article notes, there is no end. The last line stops in mid-sentence, and the first line of the book picks up that sentence. So the book is cyclical, and the club will continue at the beginning again.
posted by beagle at 6:53 AM on November 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I might be willing to spend 28 years on Finnegan's Wake if the average human lifespan were closer to, say, 600 years. But as it stands now? No, thank you.
posted by Naberius at 7:15 AM on November 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

What if we post Finnegan's Wake, a page per week, to FanFare?
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:33 AM on November 14, 2023 [8 favorites]

I read about I guy who would read two pages of Proust every night before bed for most of his life, so, hats off!
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:40 AM on November 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

read two pages of Proust every night before bed

I read Ulysses this way and am doing this with Proust now! It's a form of "reading" I like to describe as "looking at every word in order," and maybe I'll understand what I'm reading or maybe I won't. With those long, long sentences and no forward movement in anything I'd describe as a "plot," I'm finding In Search of Lost Time to be an excellent soporific. Maybe when I finish it in five years or so I'll move on to Finnegans Wake.
posted by valrus at 8:16 AM on November 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm not that interested in reading and comprehending Finnegans Wake itself (or Ulysses, or any of the famously long inscrutable works of literature that people could spend multiple years or decades studying). But I'm fascinated by the idea of the groups, especially after/during a pandemic that shook up so many of my in-person groups I used to socialize with. How many people have a non-religion-focused group that has met consistently to do the same thing, week after week, for decades? Maybe discussing Finnegans Wake isn't something I'd want to spend that many hours on, but there is something magical about the groups.
posted by j.r at 8:30 AM on November 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

What's weird is that so many book groups do a different book every meeting. Sometimes it feels like you barely have time to do more than gossip about the characters a little.

I made it through Ulysses once, sort of. There were some rewards, but I felt like to really get a lot out of it I would have to become much more of an expert on this one author's world than I wanted to.

Proust is very different. It's long, but it's not at all cryptic. Excellent bedtime reading, yes....
posted by bfields at 11:25 AM on November 14, 2023

My Wake is weirdly worn, I've never read it through, but sometimes I pick it up and read a page or two. I must be doing this more often than I think, or one of the kids has a secret passion.
Ulysses is not that hard to read, once you get into it. But I think you have to get into a flow situation, ideally read it in a day or two. I brought it with me on a very long train trip, and that was just what was needed. Then I read it with a book of annotations on the side, and new layers were unfolded, but I wouldn't do that in a first reading.
posted by mumimor at 2:56 PM on November 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

A recently deceased member of my family was a member of this book club. An early member, I think. I'm sad that he missed the end of the book by only a year or so after having been dedicated to it for so long.
posted by foxtongue at 7:22 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

fwiw, i thought this was a pretty good explainer? "For the Wake is a book about a dream..." :P
posted by kliuless at 3:03 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]