Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love Finnegans Wake, but I had to read it more than once before I felt that way about it. I read it the first time because I heard it was perhaps the most difficult book to read that had ever been written, and I wanted to see if I could do it. It took me more than two years to read it the first time. I read it with the help of the Ronald McHugh book which takes Finnegans Wake line by line and defines foreign and obscure words. I hoped that this would help me understand the book as a whole. It didn't. There were parts here and there I could make out and puns I could enjoy, but I felt hopelessly lost and decided to have nothing more to do with the book once I had finished it. However, I could not get Finnegans Wake out of my mind and decided to tackle it again a few years later. Even though there was more that I understood then than I did the first time I read it, it was still a struggle and it appeared that it would take me as long to finish it the second time as it did the first. One night as I was reading it in a state between being awake and asleep, I started dreaming. As it usually happened, my dreams jumped around from one thing to another with no logic at all. I found myself talking with others in the dream but did not understand the gist of the conversation I was having. I understood the words, but they didn't seem to be connected to each other. As I went in and out of this half awake and half dream state, I thought that dreaming was a lot like reading Finnegans Wake and that reading Finnegans Wake was a lot like dreaming. At that point I completely woke up and realized that my approach to reading the book could not have been more wrong headed. Instead of trying to understand every word and paragraph, I needed to go with the flow and read steadily without stopping. If I understood something, I was happy. If I didn't understand, so what? I kept on going. I found myself laughing at the puns and enjoying the sounds of the words. I finished the last one hundred pages in only few days. In fact, it was hard for me to put the book down even when I had other things to do. It took me only a week and a half to read it the third time, but I got far more out of it that time than I did out of the other two times put together, mainly because I didn't try to get anything out of it! I am now reading it for the fifth time and will continue to read it off and on for the rest of my life. Do I now understand the whole book? No! I probably only understand between one fifth or one sixth of it, but that is enough to hold my interest as I read. Sometimes I encounter sentences made up of foreign words or made up words that I cannnot understand at all. Then I will read a page that I can completely understand. My comprehension of what is said and what is going on fades in and out as I read just as it does when I dream, but every time I read it I pick up on things that I missed during previous readings. Instead of it being a struggle to read Finnegans Wake as it was the first time I tackled it, I now read it because I enjoy it.