UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Reading) Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnk. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnk. Back at the beginning, club members took turns reading a made-up word on the novel's first page. SCOTT: And even though the group finished the book in October, they started all over again last Tuesday because to Fialka, the circular structure of 'Finnegans Wake' means that it never truly ends. What you're really getting, sitting down for an hour and reading one page, is just really diving into the details of that specific moment. STEVEN KEDROWSKI: Reading one page a month over 20-some years, I couldn't tell you very much about the plot. Now he lives in Chicago but keeps up because the group moved to Zoom during COVID.

Others have stuck around for decades, like Steven Kedrowski, who joined the club around 2005. Sometimes it's been as many as 30 people, sometimes 12. SCOTT: This group has grown and shrunk over the years. Fialka started the group partly because he never would have read 'Finnegans Wake' on his own, but he's gotten much more from it than finishing the book.įIALKA: I've gotten to encounter a lot of people who become my friends. Gerry Fialka is an experimental filmmaker who started his 'Finnegans Wake' reading club at a library in LA's Venice Beach area in 1995. SCOTT: This is the guy who's been reading this unreadable book for 28 years. GERRY FIALKA: It's almost like tripping on acid. And what the wonderful thing about 'Finnegans Wake' is that it reinstates the necessary complexity of human existence. MCCOURT: For me, 'Finnegans Wake' is the perfect antidote to our times, where we live under the illusion that everything can be reduced to a tweet. SCOTT: John McCourt is an English professor at the University of Macerata in Italy and president of the International James Joyce Foundation. JOHN MCCOURT: It's a bit like trying to describe music - complex, symphonic music. Instead, it's dreamlike, full of made-up words, puns, run-on and disjointed passages. It doesn't follow normal storytelling conventions, you know, like consistent characters or a coherent plot. They finally finished the book last month, as Anna Scott from member station KCRW reports.ĪNNA SCOTT, BYLINE: 'Finnegans Wake' isn't just difficult - many consider it unreadable. One club founded in Los Angeles took 28 years. It's so difficult that people have formed clubs all over the world to read it out loud together, and sometimes it takes years.

The novel 'Finnegans Wake' by Irish writer James Joyce is known as one of the most difficult to read books ever written.

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