Alexis Brown\/Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nGerry Fialka, an experimental filmmaker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club dedicated exclusively to Finnegan\u2019s Wake since 1995. Between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library to read two pages of the book and discuss their opinions. Eventually, they slowed the pace down to just one page per meeting, to give themselves more debating time, so they spent the next 28 years going through the book just one time. Although some members left and others joined the group over the years, Fialka and some of the original group still meet up every month, only now they do it through Zoom.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, Fialka\u2019s book group took more to finish Finnegan\u2019s Wake than James Joyce took to write the thing, 17 years, including a four-year stretch of near-complete writer\u2019s block. Sadly, the author died shortly after publishing it, so he never had time to explain his writings, or at least give some clues, so it\u2019s up to the readers to decipher this literary puzzle.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIn the course of a meeting, I have 30 different Wikipedia tabs open,\u201d 38-year-old Peter Quadrino, a member of Gerry Fialka\u2019s reading group, said. \u201cYou\u2019re always learning about some new historical figure, or event, or some poet. It really just feels like my brain just took a shower. It\u2019s so refreshing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gerry Fialka\u2019s reading group read the last page of Joyce\u2019s 628-page book in October, but that only marked the end of their first read-through, not the end of the book club. And they don\u2019t plan on moving on to another book either. This is a Finnegan\u2019s Wake book club and its members plan to keep it that way.<\/p>\n
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