'It never ends': the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

‘It never ends’: the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake

The group in Venice, California, started the difficult James Joyce book in 1995. They reached its final page in October

Lois Beckett in Los Angeles
@loisbeckett
Sun 12 Nov 2023 08.00 EST

For a quarter century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult texts in literary history.

Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years.
…

Fialka emphasises that media reports saying his group has “finished” the book are wrong. “We didn’t end. The last sentence of the book ends midsentence and then it picks up at the front of the book. It’s cyclical. It never ends.”

This November, they started back on page three.

“There is no next book,” Fialka told me. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”