Rating: 
Summary: How dare anyone admit they enjoy non-logic!
Review: How I would mourn being inside the brain of anyone who cannot simply ENJOY something and instead demands:1) A plot. "Hey this is a book/movie, howcome there's no plot? All the other books/movies I've experienced have plots. How DARE anyone create something otherwise! The NERVE!" 2) Linearity and/or logic. "But without linearity or logic, you might as well publish a math book that says 2 + 2 = 1,364,772! Because abandoning these things means abandoning creativity also!! Everyone knows all creativity resides in the left hemisphere of the brain." Oh, of course! Go ahead and publish a string of random numbers to satisfy this belief and see if anyone "pretends to like it". 3) That no one get the funny idea of rejecting politics and intellectualism and "merely" ENJOY something. (Along with logic and linearity too?? But where's the bias in THAT??) "I enjoy my favorite foods for logical reasons!" 4) An objective translation. You poor thing! Who told me to like this book? Me. When I first started, my first thought was, "THIS got PRINTED???". I recovered from that in about five minutes and started laughing. Soon after, I felt as though I'd experienced a beautiful evolution. It CAN speak to you, but those who insist upon obstructing it with (fill in semantic here) have my condolences. As well as those who assume that anyone who likes something must be doing so because they're afraid not to. (Because everyone knows that DISLIKE is always more honest than LIKE, right?). The true courage lies in discarding these petty semantics and calling up Robert Anton Wilson to ask him if he's read it. "But I like my favorite foods for LOGICAL reasons!" Oh dear. Oh by the way, only OTHER PEOPLE'S beliefs are subjective. Not yours. Never. No way, Jose. Nuh-uh.
Rating:
Summary: Six points and a plea.
Review: To answer a few points made by other reviewers: 1) Yes, some people have finished this book. I have, and so have several people I know. 2) Some people enjoy this book. (see above). 3) It isn't just self-indulgence by academics. For example: a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University has said that it's not worth reading. Lots of academics have. These are people who 'know everything' for a job. Can you imagine how much FW annoys them? 4) It's hard. Yes, that's right, hard. But hard can be fun. Just like sex. (FW does take longer though). 5) The reason why lovers of Joyce sound so passionate about it is that they genuinely feel that way. For real. Imagine you'd fallen in love and noone around you had a clue what it felt like. You'd want to shake them and tell them. 6) It makes sense. To fully understand it (if that's possible) would take generations of study. But i) If you're reading for pleasure, not ego kicks, surely how much you get out matters more than what proportion of the book's meaning you can lay claim to, ii) like life, reading FW is made up of lots of small pleasures and ii) Lighten up!! It's funny! Anyway, when was the last time you 'fully' understood a book? It's easy to see why the great majority of people would decide that they had other priorities. I respect that opinion. But please don't fling insults at a book that some of us love. Yes, love. Reading FW was a high-point of my life. Emotion and excitement: anger, frustration, joy, humour, delight, even boredom. Deep relationships are difficult. They hurt. And they make us more alive.
Rating:
Summary: this is the book that never ends.
Review: "This is the book that never ends it goes on and on my friends. Some people started reading it not knowing what it was and they will continue reading it because this is the book that never ends..." (based on the song the never ends) If you are a person who like to read the ending first please do with this book. Read the ending or at least the last sentence. The book opens with the last half of the sentence that closes the book. Just as I jokingly changed the song lyrics from song to book, this book does not really end. It is a cycle that repeats and does not really have a begin point. Open the book any where at begin. Since it is a book that does not end, I have read the pages twice through, but truely I have never finished reading it. The book has a flow which as printed text stays the same but each reading through is different. It is a simple plot as given in the summeries, but also one of great complex. It is a book to be spoken, not one to read in silence. The way to read this work is to simply hear it. If you do not understand, simply keep listening. As a child I was told, if you do not know a word look it up. In this book, skip the looking up and keep the flow alive. At some point you will enter the flow of the words. The book remind me of the Lord of the Rings. Both authors create an multilayered and deep reality. Both authors like to play with language. LORTR is adventure styled after the sagas of spoken by the winter fires old and creates a myth saga in a dream like world. FW is styled to be spoken by a winter fire and interweaves myth with the conscious and the unconscious struggles of modern life in a dreamlike world. The LORTR is easy to follow, but the reminding ends for FW is not easy to follow. Yet how can flowing struggle of conscious and unconscious be easy to follow? It can be said half joking "that reading FW is like the withdrawl off Paxel or any of its class of drug. You risk part of your sanity as you struggle with the conscious and unconscious flow of life."
Rating:
Summary: It took me *five years*, but...
Review: Call me crazy, but I almost never stop reading a book I started. Sometimes I'm sorry I didn't give it up at first, but other times (e.g., "Moby Dick") I'm not. It took me five years to read finnegan's wake, on and off. It is probably the hardest book to read in the English language (I won't go into Joyce's use of German, French, Latin, Hebrew, etc.) But why is it worth it? What makes Finnegan's wake different from utter nonsense? A LOT. Many readers complain that they can only understand two or three points every page. True for me as well. But when I checked, the obscure points of the seemingly meaningless sentences *always* had some deeper meaning. For example, let us start with the title: "Finnegans wake" (the apostrophe that appears in many editions is a mistake.) There is at least a triple meaning: "Finnegan's wake", the wake of the mystical hero; "finnegans wake" - the Irish are waking up; and "fin-again wake" - showing the cyclical nature of the dream history of this book. Or take the year, 1132, that appears in the book quite a lot (sometimes in the guise of 566, which is 1132/2). It symbolizes the the circularity of history (11=10+1, starting to count again after reaching 10) and the fall of empires (bodies fall at 32 ft/sec^2). Or take the case of the dreamer's son, who falls from the sky as "a bare godkin". It is both a description of his condition (a naked son of God) and a pun on Hamlet's "a bare bodkin" (an unsheated dagger.) These are just three examples. But this is where Joyce's genius is - and the enjoyment of the book is. It's just plain fun to figure these things out - and when you *do* figure them out, the real meaning of the text, and the story, begins to show. It's hard work, but it's worth it.
Rating:
Summary: The Wrath of the Understanding
Review: The phrase that I've used to entitle this review is from Hegel, "Wut des Verstehens." It refers to the human drive to want to understand everything---and the irritation that human beings feel when something slips from their intellectual grasp. FINNEGANS WAKE is a ceaseless flow of language... It has neither beginning nor end... It is without sentences... Perhaps it doesn't even enfold words... Give up the attempt to understand FINNEGANS WAKE. Glide along its multitudinous surfaces. Bask in its language. Read it silently. Read it aloud. Read without trying to understand any of it. The reviews that surround this one may be used by a future scholar who would like to track down the misreception of FINNEGANS WAKE in the United States in the early twenty-first century. Again and again, Joyce is lambasted for not common-parlying. The apostles of commonsense want to hear only what they think that they already know. When a writer comes along and says something in a new way, they balk and coil. This is not a book to be understood. It is a book of darkness, of ciphers, of dreams. I will leave you with a brief excerpt from FINNEGANS WAKE, Part III. It is a description of hellos: "...after their howareyous at all with those of their dollybegs (and where's Agatha's lamb? and how are Bernadetta's columbillas? and Juliennaw's tubberbunnies?..."
Rating: 
Summary: art house intellectuals
Review: I could take in a dump in a fancy looking box and some of you people would probably label it as "The greatest singularization of Drama, Vision, Madness and Awe ever conceived of".
Rating:
Summary: this is the book that never ends.
Review: "This is the book that never ends it goes on and on my friends. Some people started reading it not knowing what it was and they will continue reading it because this is the book that never ends..." (based on the song the never ends) If you are a person who like to read the ending first please do with this book. Read the ending or at least the last sentence. The book opens with the last half of the sentence that closes the book. Just as I jokingly changed the song lyrics from song to book, this book does not really end. It is a cycle that repeats and does not really have a begin point. Open the book any where at begin. Since it is a book that does not end, I have read the pages twice through, but truely I have never finished reading it. The book has a flow which as printed text stays the same but each reading through is different. It is a simple plot as given in the summeries, but also one of great complex. It is a book to be spoken, not one to read in silence. The way to read this work is to simply hear it. If you do not understand, simply keep listening. As a child I was told, if you do not know a word look it up. In this book, skip the looking up and keep the flow alive. At some point you will enter the flow of the words. The book remind me of the Lord of the Rings. Both authors create an multilayered and deep reality. Both authors like to play with language. LORTR is adventure styled after the sagas of spoken by the winter fires old and creates a myth saga in a dream like world. FW is styled to be spoken by a winter fire and interweaves myth with the conscious and the unconscious struggles of modern life in a dreamlike world. The LORTR is easy to follow, but the reminding ends for FW is not easy to follow. Yet how can flowing struggle of conscious and unconscious be easy to follow? It can be said half joking "that reading FW is like the withdrawl off Paxel or any of its class of drug. You risk part of your sanity as you struggle with the conscious and unconscious flow of life."
Rating:
Summary: The philological scourge of our language
Review: "Finnegans Wake" is a novel for people who are tired of reading novels. The chapter summaries in the table of contents, and not the body of the novel itself, give evidence of a plot, which concerns the dream-consciousness of a man whose initials H.C.E. recur as an acronym at various points in the text and whose wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, sons Shem (the Penman) and Shaun (the Postman), and daughter Issy figure prominently among many other exotic and unexpected characters. However, the presentation is so nebulous and abstract that the novel resembles nothing else in literature, although the style looks deceptively easy to imitate. Upon first looking at the pages of "Finnegans Wake," one inevitably must wonder what it's supposed to be. My explanation of it is an extension of my theory about "Ulysses," which is that "Ulysses" was Joyce's effort to write a novel that used every single existing word in the English language, or at least as many as he could. (Among its 400,000 words, "Ulysses" certainly has a much broader lexicon than any other novel of comparable length.) Having exhausted all the possibilities of English in "Ulysses," he had only one recourse for his next project, which was to create an entirely new language as a pastiche of all the existing ones; the result is "Finnegans Wake." The language in "Finnegans Wake" is a continuum of puns, portmanteaus, disfigured words, anagrams, and rare scraps of straightforward prose. What Joyce does is exploit the way words look and sound in order to associate them with remote, unrelated ideas. For example, his phrase "Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies" may sound familiar to those who happen to know that the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet are aleph, bet, gimel, daled. "Psing a psalm of psexpeans, apocryphul of rhyme" recalls a nursery rhyme that may reside quietly in your most dormant memory cells, while "Where it is nobler in the main to supper than the boys and errors of outrager's virtue" sounds like a drunk auditioning for the role of Hamlet. Imaginary adjectives that pertain to letters of the English alphabet are employed to describe Dublin as a city "with a deltic origin and a nuinous end." "Finnegans Wake" is the ultimate in esoterica, and what you get out of it depends largely on your store of knowledge, so that upon completion, with a mutual wink at Joyce, you congratulate yourself for being so clever. The text is supposed to reflect a dream or a dreamlike state, an imperfect rendering of hazily remembered pictures and thoughts, but it also evokes the multivocal babble one might hear in a crowded Irish pub, multiple rolling streams of lilting brogue-laden speech combining into a sort of rhythmic cacophony, a variegated procession of verbal images ranging from the mundane to the fantastical. It cannot be read in any conventional manner of reading prose; each sentence has a melody, and the words must be vocalized in the mind to hear the verbal music. It can be maddening if you try to make meaning of it all, but if you're familiar with Joyce's past work, you've already risked your sanity adequately to make it through "Finnegans Wake."
Rating:
Summary: Meaningless gibberish
Review: There is nothing worse than an illiterate writer.
Rating:
Summary: Circle within circles...
Review: What can actually be said about Finnegan's Wake that would be coherent? Well, not much unless one is willing to spend a great deal of time atempting to decipher speakers from observations. However, what I can say is that this is probably the greatest work ever written. Note that I do not say I love this book or that it is my favorite book. This book is not for enjoyment, this book is meant to be thought about and even cause confusion. While the beginning of the book discusses what appears to the start of time, and ends with the beginning of time. What more can I say about a book that has everything to say?
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