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Comment by number6 | Hacker News Reader

I have this book laying around here. Read the first page and did not understand anything.

Quarks are named after a line in this book so I thought: well give it a try.

Do you have any idea how to tackle this?

I'm making my way through and haven't had any problems besides slowness (which I chose at the beginning not to treat as a problem). I did a little research before starting (for one I listened to the first season of The Cosmic Library podcast) and do a bit more when something strikes my interest (the last little dive was based on the Mookse and Gripes story: https://originalpositions.home.blog/2013/12/27/finnegans-wak...). I read it out loud to my wife some nights as she goes to sleep. It's fun and every so often intelligible; So far it seems worth it to simply press on and not try to comprehend much. I'm a rather dissatisfied monoglot and Joyce has just about managed to put me in love with English.

Also: I had a childhood habit of reading the last page of a novel before starting the book. The Wake is quite possibly the best book ever written to try that on.

It's like abstract art in book form, or trying to interpret a dream that someone else is telling you about. There are glosses of the book out there that give more context to the words and references. Having one of those can fill you in, but it's still going to be a slog.

Maybe I'm unkind, but I've never been a fan of the Wake. It's always seemed to me to be the sort of thing academics in English literature departments and lovers of abstract art really go for, but few other people can appreciate. (Nothing against literature academics or abstract artists -- it's just that their tastes are informed by things that don't inform most people's!)

If you want to appreciate Joyce as a more approachable author, 'Dubliners' is a great collection of short stories and not experimental.

I recommend "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words" by Joseph W. Campbell as a good introduction to the Wake, especially its decryption of the first few paragraphs, which are especially dense -- and not just because they're at the beginning and the reader isn't comfortable yet with the style.

I've read it all the way through three times. (I'm old.) It's worth the time, if you're willing to spend it.

I'm personally trying to read Ulysses, after picking up a book which said that Ulysses was not meant to be super-challenging to read, in fact it was meant for ordinary Irish. What I'm doing is trying to read it, and if I don't understand something, just carrying on.

Finnegan's Wake is another kettle of fish though! I wouldn't know where to start with that.

Yes, Ulysses was much more approachable & comprehensible, and I can see the appeal of the story, but something didn't click for it with me so I ended up reading the bare minimum to get a good grade on it in a college course that covered modern & post modern arts/literature etc.

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