Finnegans Wake
Follows a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. It is also a book that participates in the re-reading of Irish history that was part of the revival of the early 20th century. The author also wrote "Ulysses", "Dubliners" and "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man".
Stats for nerds
7recommend
95mentions
80people
2008–2026years
9% recommend79% neutral12% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Just dive in. Finnegans Wake is not meant to be understood in totality, you get what you can and let what you do get suggest meaning of the parts you do not get. Reread it every couple of years, you will get a bit more each time and also lose a bit of what you thought you had gotten previously; every read will be surprisingly different, you get glimpses of what you saw previous times but they are never as you remembered them.
- This is a silly joke.
A good number (I won't say plenty) of people have read Finnegans Wake and enjoyed it. At the risk of being branded a liar I can say that I've read the whole thing (out loud) and found it a very worthwhile experience. Some of the language play is very enjoyable.
- In truth, if you haven't actually read Finnegans Wake, you've missed a grand literary experience.
- finnegans wake
- a few off the top of my head in the fiction genre: Joyce's Dubliner, Ulysses & Finnegans Wake. Cervantes' Don Quixote. Borges. Dashiell Hammet. William Burroughs. Bukowski. Faulkner. Jim Thompson. Stewart O'Nan. Nabakov. Philip K Dick's more schizophrenic works ( Scanner Darkly, Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale ). Henry Miller. Gogol. Mary Karr's The Liars' Club. Flannery O'Connor. Denis Johnson. Hunter S. Thompson. Italo Calvino. T Coraghessan Boyle.
I reread Finnegans Wake and Don Quixote every couple years.
EDIT: and I have to admit to an odd attraction to and repeated returns to reading Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
- House of Leaves - What literature should be. Innovative both in design and in prose. It's very long but you can finish it in a maddening evening, it's hilarious, it's terrifying. Along with Steven King's It, one of two books to give me nightmares. Incredibly complex. It's a puzzle I still haven't fully solved. I consider it the first modern-era novel, and expect others will come like it. When I wrote a novel a year and a half ago, its design was my greatest inspiration.
Finnegans Wake - This book can't be explained until you've seen it. The pinnacle of the English language.
