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

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

8. WTF

As the article correctly stated, Finnegan's Wake is notorious as one of the all-time most difficult books to read, especially if you weren't Irish ca 1920s-1930s. It's so loaded with obscure slang, puns and references that you need an annotated guide bigger than the book to get through it all.

Now throw onto the pile how it's 656 pages of such reading, and it makes sense that it would take that long to get through a page or two every month.

Do you call every uni literature department a cult because many professors in it have devoted entire careers to analysing one book? Because that's what they do. It's what my stepfather did with Bleak House by Charles Dickens--an entire 30+ year lit prof career studying and teasing out the nuances and meanings of it.

He wasn't in a cult. That was his life's work.

Bloody hell, what is *wrong* with people who call intensive study of something worthwhile a cult?