I like this book a lot, and I've read it twice (once in university and again two years ago), but my problem with it is that it is more like a literary exercise than a novel. It is my belief that art has a responsibility to entertain, and it is difficult to make an argument that this book is entertaining. Brilliant, skillful, and a work of genius, yes. Entertaining no.

This book was written in the final stages of an experiment gone terribly wrong. Worst thing he ever wrote.

I agree that this book is absolutely brilliant. Joyce seemed to have invented a completely new language based on English that only he could understand or work with. So I don't believe that anyone who is not an English professor has ever read it through. It is not a book that can be read and understood and appreciated by anyone, it is just too indecipherable. I mean, you could spend an entire week completely decoding and interpreting a single paragraph. I suppose that some people have read it just to say they have, but don't go around telling anyone you've read it because they will not believe you, just I as will not believe you unless you are in pursuit of a Ph.D in English Literature.

Don't read this book unless you are taking a class devoted solely to this topic. Not beach reading. I believe Gilmore, there is something to this book, but the average person, even a Lit. major isn't going to get it without some help.

The proudest accomplishment of my life so far was reading every last word of "Finnegans Wake" over the course of two months this past summer, and having read and re-read numerous passages since, I can say without hesitation that this book is BRILLIANT. It reconstructs language and throws away any kind of conventional narrative techniques to create something new and bizarre. It is the alpha and the omega of over 2,000 years of world literature. I know the book has its detractors who say it is nothing but a collection of random nonsense pieced together by the near-blind Joyce, but I beg to differ. Joyce didn't waste seventeen years on a book of "random gibberish". You have to read between the lines to understand it. It uses words from fifty or sixty different languages to create some very amusing polyglot puns and multilingual wordplay. It combines this polylinguistic madness with Freudian as well as Jungian psychology, Greek, Roman and Irish mythology, all branches of philosophy and literature and joins them all together, this sum of world culture unraveling itself in the concussion-induced dream of one Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose family (wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, daughter Isis and twin sons Shem and Shaun), metamorphosing into various historical and mythological figures, populate his dream-world as well as representing Jung's theory of collective conciousness. That's what the book is all about: the dream of H. C. Earwicker, which incorporates the history of all mankind. I'm sorry if that's a very convoluted explanation, but that's about as basic an explanation it's possible to give regarding such a complex and beautiful book. Buried under the obscurity is something very profound, but no matter how much post-graduate work you do, "Finnegans Wake" will never be completely understood and spelt out in a concise way. It CAN'T be explained, the message of the book is intangible and unfathomable, but that's part of what makes it so wonderful: that you as a reader have to try to decipher its meaning yourself. It's up to the individual reader's personal knowledge to take what they can from it, and if you can bear with the obscurity of Joyce's language there can be some very rewarding results. Perhaps the book itself says it best: "If you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs..in this allaphbed! Can you rede..its world? It is the same told of all...Miscegenations on miscegenations." In short, "Finnegans Wake" is one of the most brilliant books ever written, and I love it!!

This book defines epic. It is too long. He should have stopped at Ulysses.

THE ULTIMATE NOVEL?!

this is unquestionably the single greatest literary achievment of the 20th century! kudos joyce!