1. Ulysses by James Joyce

Year Published: 1922

Pages: 552 (text only, no notes)

First Sentence: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Rating: 2/3 (I don't recommend it but also it blew my mind)

Review:

Part I: Introduction

Considering how long it's taken me to finally sit down and write my review of Ulysses, you'd think I wasn't quite ready to finish my time with The List. That's not quite so. I finished reading the book a little over a week ago, but of course any number of things prevented me from taking the time to write down my thoughts on it.

(To get the obvious question out of the way—no I don't feel any sense of relief just yet. I'm saving that for the day my review of Pride and Prejudice goes live on the blog.)

Now, I want to revisit my original mission statement before I get too far in this review. I began the project of reading the Top 100 novels to see if they would speak to someone without an education in literary analysis and criticism, specifically an engineer. While I've semi-abandoned my engineering career, I've stuck with this project. The books themselves have taught me a thing or two, and what with a lot of reading and a lot of life lessons, I'm a much more careful reader than the young woman who started the project by checking The Magnificent Ambersons out of the library in late 2009.

However, I still don't know anything formal or official about literature. I've never read the actual Odyssey yet in any form, despite my ongoing attachment to Greek myth. I I know the broadest of strokes: Ulysses/Odysseus goes to fight in the Trojan War, and then angers the gods such that he and his crew wander the earth for many years before they can return home. Highlights include outwitting a cyclops, being chained to the mast of his ship so he can hear the sirens' song, and getting waylaid by Circe, who transforms the crew into animals. When he gets home, Odysseus has to slaughter a bunch of men who want to marry his wife. I don't know how that all fits together, though, and I don't know anything about the Lotus Eaters, or his son Telemachus, or etc.

Of course I was already somewhat familiar with James Joyce's Ulysses by reputation as well. I knew that it takes place over the course of one day in Dublin (specifically June 16, 1904). I knew that it features, in the role of Odysseus/Ulysses, a man named Leopold Bloom. I also had heard there were some dirty parts, that the style was difficult, and so on.

Having tousled with James Joyce previously over Finnegans Wake (brilliant trolling of the literary establishment that should not be categorized as a novel) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (mostly just boring), and armed with Stephen Fry's praise from this old Youtube video, I dug in to Ulysses with cautious realism.

Part 2: Ulysses as Object

Okay okay, another digression before I actually review the book. In the case of Ulysses, one must identify the edition they've read. I always want to roll my eyes when academic types refer to something as "a text" (even as I acknowledge the usefulness of the term) but Ulysses really is a text. I read the Alma Classics edition, based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition. In this edition, 552 pages are the text of the novel Ulysses, 316 pages are the annotations by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner, and ten pages are the bibliography for the notes. I estimate that I read about 50 pages of the notes. I definitely didn't read all of them because I wanted to get into the rhythm of the novel as much as I could. The highest number of notes I found on a single page was 90 on a page in the Cyclops chapter, which had a long list of actual and invented saints.

Sam Slote wrote the Introduction, which of course I didn't read.

The final thing I'll say about this is that the print in this book was the smallest I've ever seen. I'm sure it would be over a thousand pages if the print were closer to the average size. And it was hard to hang onto already!

Part 3: What Happens

In the following section, every time I state categorically that something happens in this book, that a character is a certain way, etc., imagine that statement followed by a row of question marks in parentheses, like so (????????). I'm honestly not sure I know anything about this, but it would get very tedious for me to be repeating that as often as necessary. I'm happy to be corrected.

The book is split into three parts. The first is only 40 pages and introduces Stephen Dedalus, who you may remember from APotA. Here he's in the role of Telemachus, son of Odysseus, and he's just wandering around Dublin in the morning if I'm not mistaken.

The three chapters in Part I are:

1. Telemachus (8-9 a.m. in Martello Tower, Sandycove)
2. Nestor (10-11 a.m. in or at Boys' school, Dalkey)
3. Proteus (11 a.m.-12 p.m. in or at Sandymount Strand)

I have no idea how to account for the missing hour between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. I'd always thought that Ulysses was a full 24 hours from the exclusive point of view of Leopold Bloom, but I was definitely mistaken. In any case, Stephen Dedalus was heading to Paris at the end of APotA but now his mother has died and he's back in Dublin, still a young man. His section begins in a fairly straightforward style but it's not long before his stream of consciousness breaks in.

Part II is where Leopold Bloom is introduced and goes about his day. He's in his late 30s. He has a wife, Molly Bloom, and a daughter, Milly. The main thing that stuck with me from his introduction is that he loves to eat organs and this smell lingers on his breath. I'm both too dumb and too lazy to enumerate the multitude of styles, modes, and experiments employed by Joyce throughout this core section of the book. Each chapter has its own conceit. There are 12 of them, again covering more than 12 hours and incorporating some gaps to my astonishment:

4. Calypso (8-9 a.m. at/in 7 Eccles Street and environs
5. Lotus Eaters (10-11 a.m. around the Westland Row station)
6. Hades (11 a.m.-12 p.m. in a funeral cortège that starts from Sandymount and travels through the city centre to Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin)
7. Aeolus (12-1 p.m. in the offices of the Freeman's Journal, 4-8 Prince's Street North)
8. Lestrygonians(1-2 p.m. in Central Dublin, from the offices of the Freeman's Journal to the National Museum on Kildare Street, via Davy Byrne's pub on Duke Street)
9. Scylla and Charybdis (2-3 p.m. at the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street)
10. Wandering Rocks (2:55-4 p.m. throughout Dublin)
11. Sirens (4-5 p.m. at the Ormond Hotel bar, 8 Upper Ormond Quay, and environs)
12. Cyclops (5-6 p.m. at Barney Kiernan's pub, 8-10 Little Britain Street, and environs)
13. Nausicaa (8-9 p.m. at Sandymount Strand, by Leahy's Terrace)
14. Oxen of the Sun (10-11 p.m. at National Maternity Hospital, 29-31 Holles Street)
15. Circe (12-1 a.m., at Bella Cohen's brothel, Mecklenburgh Street, and environs)

Bloom gets up to all kinds of excitement over the course of his day. He attends a funeral and spends the whole day in mourning clothes so that everyone who sees him expresses their concern/dismay. He goes to the office of the newspaper where he works selling ads (apparently he doesn't earn his keep on the ads alone and is helped out by being a member of the Freemasons). He visits a few different bars, and as it gets late, he ends up in the "night town," the red light district.

That last bit is the Circe chapter. It's by far the longest chapter in the book, written in the format of a drama, with stage directions, and is overall just very surreal and weird.

At last we arrive at Part III, where Bloom and Dedalus actually meet up. They vaguely know each other somehow. Bloom is 15 years or more Dedalus's senior. Bloom's only son died in infancy (leading to the cessation of marital relations between him and his wife) and he feels some fatherly affection for Stephen. The two of them leave the brothel and go to Bloom's home.

There are three more chapters in this part:

16. Eumaeus (1-2 a.m. in/at the cabman's shelter, near the Custom House)
17. Ithaca (2-3 a.m., in/at 7 Eccles Street)
18. Penelope (3-4 a.m., in/at 7 Eccles Street and elsewhere)

Instead of actually describing the conversation between the two men in Ithaca, Joyce instead writes it as a series of questions and answers. Then, when Stephen finally leaves, we get the last chapter of the book, which are Molly Bloom's thoughts as she's drifting between sleeping and waking, as her husband joins her in bed.

Part 4: The Dirty Parts

There are a couple of notorious dirty parts in this novel that I would be remiss not to address.

First of all, in the Sirens chapter, Bloom comes across a young girl and masturbates to completion while looking at her, under his clothes. What I didn't realize when I'd heard about this incident previously, is that we get to see a big chunk of it from the perspective of the girl, and she's aware of what's happening and into it. Unless, of course, what we're actually getting is what Bloom imagines the girl's perspective is, which is certainly possible.

Secondly, and I think less well-known, is an incident that's likely to be the first example of transgender fisting in the literary canon. I saw an article that mentioned this and couldn't fathom what it might mean until I got to the part of the book it references.

BELLO 

... (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here, wet the deck and wipe it round!

This is from the Circe chapter, and I believe Bloom has taken the form of a sow at this point in the narrative. Like I said, it's very surreal. There are other dirty parts for sure (Molly Bloom is an undeniably sexual being, for instance). But those are some highlights.

Part 5: So What Did I Think?

I have to admit that my expectations for Ulysses were very, very low, especially after reading APotA, which I thought might be more straightforward and interesting.

In some ways, my expectations were met. I didn't enjoy the act of reading Ulysses. It was more or less hard work the whole way through and frequently I was just reading for the sake of getting through the book, rather than for understanding. It's too long, although God help me if I could figure out exactly what to chop out.

On the other hand Ulysses blew my mind.

There are several aspects of this that I didn't touch on it my relation of the broad events of the book, or only briefly. Leopold Bloom has Jewish Hungarian origins, for example, and no one will let him forget it. Stephen Dedalus has extensive opinions on Shakespeare and his relationship with his wife Anne. Various characters at various times have a lot to say about Irish home rule, the Catholic church, and prominent social and political issues of both their own and Joyce's time. Joyce is constantly referencing specific locations, shops, and offices in Dublin.

More than any book I've ever read before Ulysses captures real people in a real place. (I'm reassured to find that Virginia Woolf agreed with me on the value and boredom of the novel.) The huge specificity of the book is one of the many challenges for the modern reader, though. So many of the particulars are long forgotten, hence the 300 pages of explanatory notes.

And then, even as Joyce achieved that, he also did it while bursting through numerous bounds of the form of the novel. I appreciate this experimentation less, though I do respect it. I especially appreciated the chapter where he moves through a whole succession of literary styles, proving at a couple of points that it wasn't beyond him to write a wholly intelligible paragraph now and then.

More than anything Ulysses made me wonder at and about James Joyce as a person, and the book as a personal achievement. How did this man come to write this book, and cram so much into it? Where did the subjects of his interest end? How did he write this book? How did he know when it was done? If Finnegans Wake hadn't made me so angry I might've wondered the same things about it, except that it doesn't overflow its pages the way Ulysses does.

Ulysses made me think about my world and how I exist in it and what it would take to actually capture that world in the pages of a novel. It made me wonder if there's a 21st century version of Joyce who could write the 21st century version of Ulysses, or if he was truly one of a kind. It made me conscious of what a book is and what it can do.

Part 6: Conclusion

One of the reasons it's taken me so long to write this review (it's now three weeks since I finished reading the book) is that I'm extremely conflicted on where to come down on it.

I'll start with some low-hanging fruit.

Ulysses more than deserves its place in the literary canon. It even deserves its place on The List. No other book on The List works as hard as Ulysses or made me feel the way it did. If Finnegans Wake was trolling, Ulysses is more of an epiphany.

So, if you've ever though of reading it one day, do. I don't recommend going in as blind as I did. You'd be well-served to read one of the many, many introductory texts out there.

But what to say about Ulysses as far as it concerns the average reader? Is it a good book or just an important one? Here at the end of my journey through The List, I'm not sure if I'm an average reader anymore. Certainly I can't separate my feelings about finishing Ulysses after spending over a decade with The List, from the way it made me think about literature, from the overall bad time I had with the book on a page by page level. Despite all the time I spent with Bloom, I was too confused most of the time to feel as if I knew him at all.

I guess maybe the answer can be found back at the beginning of this whole project. I referred to a competing, reader-selected list, with Ulysses in the 100th position instead of first. The further away we all get from the time when Ulysses was written, the harder it will be to decode. If I've learnt anything from The List it's to stop reading books I don't enjoy and I don't think many people in 2021 and beyond would enjoy Ulysses. At the same time, every now and then, I think it's a good idea to experience art that challenges your assumptions.

So I guess that's what I'll recommend. Challenge yourself, or make something that will challenge someone else. I challenged myself with reading The List, and now that I've finished, I'll move on to new challenges.

For now, time is u.p.: up.

- - - - -

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...

- - - - -

We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.

- - - - -

3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Year Published: 1916

Pages: 285

First Sentence: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow that was coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named tuckoo. . . .

Rating: 1/3 (don't bother)

Review:

Having been subjected to Finnegans Wake, I will never forgive The List for placing two more of James Joyce's works in the Top Three. At least A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is short (unlike its title, which I'll be abbreviating as APotA for the rest of this review).

APotA is about Stephen Dedalus. It begins when he's a small boy attending a Jesuit school in Ireland, and follows him through his youth. Throughout the book the prose style evolves with him, so that things become more or less coherent as it goes on. Though we do meet some of Stephen's family, teachers, and friends, the focus is very tight on Stephen and his feelings throughout the whole thing.

I can't believe I'm admitting this, but I'm committed to giving my honest opinion: there were a few parts of the book that I actually liked. Certainly they were well-executed. One of these was the way Stephen and his friends behave. I enjoyed how they played with Latin (none of which I understood and probably all fart jokes knowing Joyce) while occasionally roughhousing in the street. I could picture them as a group of boisterous teen schoolboys.

The other thing that I actually found myself relating to a little bit (I'm as shocked as you are) was Stephen's struggle with religion. Especially good was his period of teen devoutness, something I didn't exactly go through myself but definitely witnessed among my peers. I had almost forgotten about it when I picked up this book, which portrays the phenomenon so well. Teen runs errant then has a religious encounter with some charismatic, fiery preacher or in this case a convincing priest in a confessional, convincing them to completely reform their ways... for a while. I do find it interesting that this religious trial balloon experience doesn't appear more often, at least in the fiction I've read. We see the Jesus freak types who started out that way and aren't likely to ever change, but we don't see the ones just trying it on for size.

Anyway, enough praise. I still don't like James Joyce and I didn't care for APotA. According to the introduction of the edition of the book I read, it began as another work called Stephen Hero, which was less tightly focussed on Stephen and instead features more of the characters and events occurring in his life over the course of the novel. In the final work, these are addressed obliquely—if at all. However, as is becoming more and more clear at this point in my reading life, the intense focus on a protagonist like Stephen isn't one I'm particularly interested in, especially not from James Joyce. Without those other characters to expand Stephen's world and give it texture, this book didn't hold my interest.

As for the prose: it is actually prose, to my great relief. (I continue to live in dread and hope regarding Ulysses.) I even marked a some passages, one of which is below (the other is the very end of the book, which doesn't seem like it should be allowed). The evolving style as Stephen ages is a neat trick, and the transition is surprisingly seamless. I'm not sure I've ever accused Joyce of a lack of adeptness in his writing, anyway.

I'm fairly sure that this is a book that won't stick with me. I guess we'll see.

- - - - -

Devotion had gone by the board. What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction? A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night though he knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in his own sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offence was too grievous to be atoned for in whole or in part by a false homage to the Allseeing and Allknowing.

- - - - -

Finnegans Wake: The Musical

Apparently there actually has been a musical adaptation of Finnegans Wake presented at an Off Broadway theatre almost exactly ten years ago. I have literally no information about it besides the article I linked to, so.

What I’m actually writing about today is a project I was alerted to via a comment that I got on Finnegans Wake: The Audiobook, which I’m pretty sure is the most popular post in the history of this blog, because literally no one wants to read Finnegans Wake.

Of course the existence of this project gives the lie to that statement.

Waywords and Meansigns just went live on May 4, the 76th anniversary of the book’s publication. It’s all of Finnegans Wake set to music, for free, and while I can promise you that I won’t be listening to it (aside from possibly sampling some isolated bits until I ragequit), if you absolutely must experience this book after everything that I’ve said against it, this seems like it'll end up being the least unbearable option.

Anthony Burgess on Finnegans Wake

I finally finished reading But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? (a collection of Anthony Burgess' essays that I'd been reading since July '11) on Sunday night. I'm a decently big fan of his, but the collection could've been curated a bit better, I think.

Burgess is, as it turns out, way too much of a James Joyce fan, and I present here a page that I dog-eared several months ago:

The world has forgiven Joyce for the excesses of Ulysses, but it is not yet ready to forgive him for the dementia of Finnegans Wake. Yet it is difficult to see what other book he could well have written after a fictional ransacking of the human mind in its waking state. Ulysses Sometimes touches the borders of sleep, but it never actually enters its kingdom. Finnegans Wake is frankly a representation of the sleeping brain. It took Joyce seventeen years to write between eye operations and worry about the mental collapse of his daughter Lucia. He got little encouragement, even from Ezra Pound, that prince of avant-gardistes; his wife Nora merely said that he ought to write a nice book that ordinary people could read. But clearly Finnegans Wake had to be written, and Joyce was the only man dedicated or mad enough to write it.

[... Here Burgess gets into "the plot" of Finnegans Wake and selected symbols within it, all very sensible and irritating ...]

There must be many people, and they of the most literate, who have opened the book and groaned wretchedly at what they found:

[... Here he quotes it, but I've already given sufficient samples I think ...]

It looks like nonsense, but it isn't. Joyce never wrote a line of nonsense in his life.

Burgess is a bit of a know-it-all, but he also seems to know everything, and is brilliant at the very least, so it's earned. I definitely don't agree with him on the necessity of Finnegans Wake or its lack of nonsense. But I still really like A Clockwork Orange.


I'm tagging this post with Anthony Burgess and Ulysses as well, since they'll be relevant in several years' time.

Finnegans Wake: The Audiobook

So, as I mentioned in my Finnegans Wake review, I actually read/listened to/absorbed most of the book through an audiobook.

As it turns out, I was extremely fortunate to find that audiobook when I did, because just now when I went to find it again, I discovered that it's since been removed from that website (UbuWeb seems to be some kind of unlicensed content stockpile that looks super legit but isn't actually).

Anyway, the whole point of this post is that while I was looking for the audiobook, I found a blog post by some other poor sucker about how terrible it was. (From what I can tell, the Patrick Healey edition that I and this random blogger are talking about seems to be the only unabridged audiobook of Finnegans Wake in existence. And maybe you can buy it here for a hysterical sum of money?)

Random Blogger brings up a couple of points that I wanted to address, in case you happen to want to seek out this audiobook for some insane reason, mainly because I had the actual paper book handy while I was listening to the audiobook, and I think that gave me a slightly different perspective from Random Blogger's.

Healey takes a book that needs, nay, DEMANDS a slow, careful reading, and speeds through it like he only has a day to finish.

This is absolutely true. As much as I hated every second of Finnegans Wake, read or listened to, and wanted it to be over as soon as possible, it's pretty clear to me that the book requires a slow and careful reading if you're going to get anything out of it at all, and each syllable needs careful enunciation. Whenever I picked up the paper version of the book to glance at while I listened to the audiobook, I was always dismayed to note that Healey was actually skipping syllables in his rush.

[H]e frequently stutters, trips up on words, and has to start over.

Although I think there are a few places in the recording where this happens and it's a real mistake, actually a lot of the stuttering and repetition is within the text itself. Healey does really trip up on some words, though, and it's kind of infuriating: if he's going to insist on this kind of frenetic reading pace, he should be able to maintain it.

Finally, he reads every goddamn sentence with nary a change in tone, and when he does change his tone, its into some mumbling, slow bullshit...

I disagree with this, but this is where my inexperience with audiobooks will show most. I thought that tone variations were pretty good considering the horrors of the material being read and, of course, the inexplicable speed of the reading.

To sum up: I feel like I need to state again that you should just never ever go anywhere near this book, in any form, if you don't have to, whatever I or anyone else may say about the quality of the recording of it. And that's pretty much it for this one.

77. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Hi kids! I'd originally intended for this review to go up on Monday, but then on Sunday I decided to start watching season 7 of The X-Files, and I couldn't stop until I finished it on Wednesday, at which point my sister and I started playing the new Twisted Metal game. But here's this review at long last. Unfortunately, this book had a sort of Bend in the River type of effect on me, so I'm going to be reading whatever the hell I want for the next while, before I get to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I'll try to keep posting roughly weekly, though, even if it's just random ponderings about stuff. Anyway, enjoy :) -M.R.


Uncomfortable Plot Summary: James Joyce trolls the entire literary establishment OR the soundtrack of Hell.

An actual photo of James Joyce taken during the writing of Finnegans Wake.

Year Published: 1939
Pages: 628
First Sentence: riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Rating: 0/3 (burn any copy you encounter)

grrrrrr...

Review:
I've been thinking for a long while now, especially since I stopped reading the romnovs, what a shame it is that none of the books have gotten me very riled up.

And then came Finnegans Wake.

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Fuck this book. Fuck it and the apparent legions of people who think that it's amazing or somehow funny. Fuck the Modern Library board members who put it on the list of greatest novels. Fuck everything.

Because Finnegans Wake is absolutely not a novel and I refuse to call it one.

If you haven't heard of Finnegans Wake and you're wondering why I'm so angry about it and why I whined about it on Twitter for two weeks, well! I didn't know anything about it either, until I was reading Kim and decided to see whether the "pocket" James Joyce on my bookshelf (another book that I inherited from an elderly and/or deceased relative) contained the full text of Finnegans Wake so that I wouldn't have to worry about getting it from the library. Alas no, Finnegans Wake is anything but pocket-sized, but in its preface to the selections of Finnegans Wake that it does contain, the pocket James Joyce states

The fact that critics have already arrived at a rough agreement as to its methods and premises, its characters and situations, is a testimonial to the artistic sincerity and intellectual rigor of Joyce's last book. But it would not be worth the trouble of elucidation if it did not offer the immediate satisfactions of humor and poetry. Its texture is so close, its structure so organic, that it cannot yet be considered readable in the sense of an ordinary novel. . . . [Its] circular construction . . . invites us to plunge in almost anywhere. By printing certain fragments in pamphlet form, however, Joyce seems to have recognized that they were especially attractive and instructive for this purpose.

Somehow that didn't worry me. I think my thoughts were somewhere between "Excellent, a novel version of 'The Night Pat Murphy Died'!" and "Well, surely it's no worse than The Ginger Man!"

And then two pages later the pocket James Joyce offered this, under the heading "Here Comes Everybody":

Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream that Bronto loved and Brunto has a lean on. Hic cubat edilis. Apud liberatinam parvulam. Whatif she be in flags or flitters, reekierags or sundyechosies, with a mint of mines or beggar pinnyweight.

WHAT.

Arrah, sure, we all love little Anny Ruiny, or, we mean to say, lovelittle Anna Rayiny, when unda her brella, mid piddle med puddle, she ninny-nannygoes nancing by. Yoh! Brontolone slaaps, yoh snores.

WHAT.

Upon Benn Heather, in Seeple Isout too. The cranic head on him, caster of his reasons, peer yuthner in yondmist. Whooth?

WHAT?!

And this gibberish goes on for pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and six hundred and twenty-eight pages of complete nonsense.

Gentle reader, I almost gave up, and better books (relatively, that is) have beaten me before this one. But I found an audiobook, and that's how I "read" the vast majority of the book. (I'm going to discuss that sort of separately in another post, because I have Thoughts About It, but let's get back to the task at hand.)

Finnegans Wake is pretty much the number one reason why I have this blog in the first place i.e. to see whether the classics of (modern) literature have any relevance for an ordinary reader. And this one, at least, does not. There's no plot or characters that I can tell you about. There isn't even a writing style beyond this sort of breathless free fall of multilingual puns and portmanteaus. Occasionally some sort of structure and possibly even narrative surfaces, only to sink below the surface on the next page. Listening to the audiobook made my head hurt, and I'm absolutely positive that this book is read in an endless loop, booming down through all the circles of Hell to torment the damned even further than the eternal fires ever could.

I think what makes me most angry about this book, though, is that it's obviously a masterpiece. (Just not a fucking novel or at all enjoyable to read, look at, or have in one's home. At best it's a puzzle, at worst an elaborate joke.) This book represents a feat that would be impossible for any other human being to duplicate. But it's not a feat that I can really respect. It was a huge fucking waste of my time to read, and I would've given up on it within five pages if it weren't for my completionist sensibilities and commitment to this blog lol. What boggles my mind even more is the apparently vast machinery of books and websites and normal people who are absolutely dedicated to Finnegans Wake in ways that I don't even understand. Just gonna throw this out there, but if you say that Finnegans Wake is funny (seriously where the fuck does this claim come from?) or, like, worth anybody's time to try to read, I probably will respect you a little bit less, too.

Meaning that I can't love Anthony Burgess quite so much anymore (what with A Clockwork Orange at least appearing to be very much under the Joycean influence—from a random page of it: "All the time we were sirening off to the rozz-shop, me being wedged between two millicents and being given the odd thump and malenky tolchock by these smecking bullies."), or Mark Z. Danielewski either (random bit of Only Revolutions: "GAS STATION MAN, stiffed by our approach. Unsafe for all HE's stashed and stayed. Withering, calcifying. Splayed. Because everyone we blow by, we blow away.").

These crazy Finnegans Wake apologists tend to talk about the book like it's immensely readable, and while I'll give Stephen Fry's gently effusive praise of Ulysses the benefit of the doubt for now, I've experienced Finnegans Wake and it may or may not have almost killed me, and I absolutely don't think it deserves to be on The List, even as a masterpiece, even as a powerful influence on some writers I like a lot. I can't learn anything from a book that I'm unable to understand. If James Joyce seriously expected me and the rest of his readers to devote our lives to this, then he's kind of a dick, no matter how sad he was about going blind or his daughter's schizophrenia (I had to learn a lot more about this book than I usually do about the books on The List, just to make it bearable and, like, try to understand what was going on).

Anyway, Finnegans Wake is the cinnamon challenge of books. Don't attempt to read it just because you think that it can't be as bad as everyone says it is, and you're smarter than the rest of us, and all that bullshit. You'll save yourself a lot of grief and rage if you just avoid it entirely.

Quotations:
nope