This book club spent 28 years reading “Finnegans Wake,” and now they’re starting again, and they’re not the only ones!

This book club spent 28 years reading “Finnegans Wake,” and now they’re starting again, and they’re not the only ones!

Nov 15 2023

For a quarter century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult texts in literary history.

Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years.

And this November, they’re starting again: “The last sentence of the book ends midsentence and then it picks up at the front of the book. It’s cyclical. It never ends.”

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