Jody Serrano
Editor in chiefEditor in Chief at Xataka On. Before joining Webedia, I was a tech reporter at Gizmodo and The Messenger. While I've covered all sorts of things related to technology, I'm specialized in writing about social media, Internet culture, Twitch, and streamers.
There are plenty of readers out there that take a while to finish a book. It took me nearly a year to finish Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. In my defense, one of the main characters was getting on my nerves, which led to me dropping the book for weeks at a time to get a breather. (Spoiler: Now I love that character. Ah, the power of books).
But a couple of months to a year pale in comparison to how long an Austin, Texas-based book club has been reading Finnegan’s Wake, the 1939 novel by James Joyce. The group has been reading the book for 12 years, and it’s nowhere near done.
Not your ordinary book club. The “Finnegans, Wake!” Reading Group in Austin meets every other week to talk about the book on a Zoom call. This allows the group's local and international members to join in.
During the meeting, each member reads two lines until they finish with one page. Then, they spend an hour and half researching what they read, making notes, and trying to figure out just what Joyce was trying to say. As you can imagine, it’s a lot.
“We used to read two pages per meeting,” Peter Quadrino the founder and organizer of the reading group, told local outlet KUT. “Then at a certain point there was just so much going on in the pages and so much in the discussion that we had to lower it to one page per meeting.”
The work of a “god, talking in his sleep.” Calling Finnegan’s Wake a complicated book to read is an understatement. The 628-page book begins mid-sentence with the following: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bendof bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back toHowth Castle and Environs."
It also ends without a period. Finnegan's Wake tells multiple stories at the same time, contains reinvented words, and has references to dozens of languages.
The book can appear to be gibberish to some first-time readers, and it’s not hard to see why. Take a look at this line, for example: “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner- ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!”
A 1939 review in the New Yorker called the book “extraordinary,” though the critic admitted that he understood “precious little of it.” Instead of Joyce, the critic proposed that a “god, talking in his sleep” might have written Finnegan’s Wake.
Reading it is certainly no picnic. The book has references to 19th century Irish politics, French literature, and even the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
“In the course of a meeting, I have 30 different Wikipedia tabs open,” Quadrino said in an interview with The Guardian in 2023. “You’re always learning about some new historical figure, or event, or some poet. It really just feels like my brain just took a shower. It’s so refreshing.”
One of many. Quadrino’s book club isn’t the only one dedicated to reading Finnegan’s Wake. There are reading groups around the world doing the same thing in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Dublin, and Zurich.
According to Quadrino, each of the groups has their own personality.
“The New York group is really argumentative, and they’re always yelling at each other, but they’re all friends, they’ve all known each other for 20 years,” he said.
The Zurich group, meanwhile, is “benevolent, although it can also become competitive and contentious,” according to two of its members.
Do any of these groups ever finish? Yes, though it takes a long time. In 2023, a California reading group finished the book after 28 years. Another group in Dublin is on track to finish in 15 years, which is considered “brisk.”
For many, the reading groups aren’t just about understanding Finnegan’s Wake, they’re about interaction and friendship. Quadrino, for instance, calls his group the “most fulfilling thing in my life.”
The sentiment would likely please Joyce, the book’s author. Joyce spent 17 years writing Finnegan’s Wake, which included a four-year period of severe writer’s block. The author once said that the perfect reader for his books was one that was “suffering from an ideal insomnia.”
“The demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his entire life to reading my works,” Joyce said.
Image | Mariia Zakatiura | Wikimedia Commons
Related | After Years of Reading Books on My Phone, Here Are Some Apps and Tips on How to Get Started
View 0 comments