So. I love to read. Books are like magic. They take us to places we have never been before. Either in the real world or in the world of the make-believe, that is often believable. But for me? At this stage in my life? Reading has to be enjoyable, or I won’t do it. I spent years reading textbooks and manuals and learning guides. Countless hours have been devoted to the Polly brain in regards to studying and remembering. These days, I think reading should be a joy ride. Whether I’m learning something or not.
Apparently, not everyone shares my viewpoint on this. I recently read an article that described a Los Angeles Book Club. This group has spent the last 28 years reading James Joyce’s’ Finnegans Wake,’ and they still do not understand one little bit of it.
Joyce. What a guy. Let me tell you this about him:
James Joyce once famously declared, “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”
That’s quite a statement if you ask me. I haven’t devoted my entire life to any such thing in this way, except maybe for eating fried eggs for breakfast every morning. Here’s something else about me. I’ve never finished a novel by this man.
A bit about the book in question.
Finnegans Wake was James Joyce’s last and (arguably) most famously challenging novel. It has been described as a “30-dimensional polyglot crossword puzzle.”
Now, this California book club’s reading pace certainly reflects its difficulty. They’ve been meeting for nearly three decades. Every month. During that time they spend two hours deciphering just one to two pages of the novel. The meeting always begins with members reading the pages aloud.
That all may sound straightforward, but it is not. It is a difficult task, as Joyce had a tendency to make up words (sometimes comprised of more than 100 letters) and play with sound. One of the club members said that reading the book out loud is “almost like tripping on acid.”
But what exactly makes Finnegans Wake so indecipherable? In my opinion, it is a bunch of unorganized jibberish. I’m not alone in thinking this way.
“Finnegans Wake isn’t just difficult—many consider it unreadable,” said NPR reporter Anna Scott. “It doesn’t follow normal storytelling conventions, you know, like consistent characters or a coherent plot. Instead, it’s dreamlike, full of made-up words, puns, run-on, and disjointed passages.”
This particular book club, it turns out, puts up with the struggle mainly because the bond of the struggle forms a sense of community. They sound lonely to me. I mean, thirty years of this? I would have moved on to sharing tuna casserole recipes. Or group knitting sessions.
At any rate, this LA group finally finished the book. They could make no sense of it. And so, just like the novel, the Los Angeles book club has rejected an ending. Instead, they’ve circled right back to page one of Finnegans Wake. They’re doing it all over again. Like I said, I think they are lonely.
Truly, I’m not sure why people read Joyce. His book Ulysses was the same way. I tossed it after a few pages of nonsensical jibber jabber.
I’ll say it again: I read these days for enjoyment, which ultimately broadens my awareness of the world and my place in it.
If the milk is sour, I won’t drink it either.
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“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde
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“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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“′Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read.”
― Mark Twain
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Is it awake, this Wake? Not in my mind.
