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Okay, I know you have a hard time reading. I know because it's happened to many of us and because we live in a time when we have increasingly dispersed attentionBut keep reading, and you'll see that you don't read as slowly as you think...
An infinite reading club
Imagine devoting yourself to a single book for nearly three decades. Almost 30 years of reading the same book! That's precisely what a very unique group of readers in Venice, California, did.
From 1995 to 2023, the Finnegans Wake Book Club of California met religiously every month to read—and of course to discuss what they had read—just a page from the darkest of James Joyce's books.
At first, its members read two pages a month, but although it may seem like a joke, it isn't: they soon discovered that this pace was "too intense" for the dense style. Joycean, so they reduced it to a single page at each meeting.
At that ridiculously slow pace, it took them 28 years old reach the end of Finnegans Wake.
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Well, it turns out that the chosen book was no coincidence. Finnegans Wake, from 1939 is famous for being one of the most strange and difficult of modern literature. It took Joyce 17 years to write these 628 pages, which merge the real world with dreams, peppered with wordplay, neologisms, and references to some 80 different languages.
A true gift of literature…
It is therefore not surprising that Joyce himself joked that "The perfect reader would have to suffer from 'ideal insomnia' and dedicate his entire life to his works."After nearly 30 years of meetings, club members can confirm that, at least in this case, the author wasn't exaggerating in the slightest…
About this impossible book
The structure of Finnegans Wake is circular: His last sentence is left unfinished and continues at the beginning of the bookLiterally, the end blends into the beginning. Hence, after reading the last line in October 2023, readers decided to start over "exactly on page three," aware that, as organizer Gerry Fialka warned, "the end of the page is a mistake." In his own words:
“There’s no next book… we’re just reading one, forever… We’re never done. The book is cyclical. It never ends.”
No wonder the group needs so much time: even specialists admit that Finnegans Wake It resists any attempt at conventional reading. To understand the magnitude of the challenge, this comparison suffices: It took the club longer to read it than it took Joyce to write it..
Joyce worked on the novel for 17 years, while the club needed 28 to “savor and understand it.” An Irish expert pointed out that this record may well be unique.While his own group in Dublin finished in about 15 years, the one in California took almost twice as long.
The Beginning of the Venice Book Club
The group was born from the concern of Gerry Fialka, an experimental filmmaker and lover of the eccentricIn 1995, when he was just over 40, he organized the first meeting at the local library in Venice, Los Angeles.
About twenty people showed up at each meeting, all intrigued to read a page or two of this mysterious work. After the first few sessions, they realized how complicated the text was and adjusted the dynamics: from two pages to a single page per monthAccording to Fialka, the idea arose precisely because “I would never have read Finnegans Wake on my own.”, so he invited others to embark on the adventure with him.
Over the years, the meeting place changed: from the public library to Zoom calls (especially during the pandemic). Some readers were local, others came from far away; one of them, Peter Quadrino, traveled three hours from San Diego! so he wouldn't miss the session.
Quadrino himself, now a 38-year-old accountant, recalls that when he moved to Austin decided to create a similar club there, posting posters and even advertising in the local newspaper. Twelve years later, his Texas group has read half of Finnegans Wake and plans to finish it in about two decades, another example of extreme dedication.
The diversity of the group was broad. There was everything from readers of 12 to 98 years participating at different times. Ordinary people: one library administrator described them as “very intelligent and a little strange people”.
Among them is Bruce Woodside, a 74-year-old Disney retiree who began reading Finnegans Wake in his teens and joined the club in the 90s. Woodside fell and returned: after leaving the group for two decades, he returned retired and found that in that time “the group had advanced from chapter 1 to 15.”
He says that what he liked most is that “Gerry's club it was just fun”. For Woodside and others, the book has a “visionary quality” even though, to the naked eye, it appears to be “628 pages of what look like typos.”
A slow but demanding pace
The key to the club's uniqueness was the pace of reading: one page a month, without rushingAt each meeting, he takes a couple of hours to read that passage aloud, dwelling on the most cryptic words and discussing their meaning (or lack thereof).
“Reading one page a month for 20 years wouldn't tell you much about the plot; what you're really doing is immersing yourself in the details of that particular moment.”
Gerry Fialka He compares it to “tripping on acid” (metaphorically speaking, of course…). That image emerged in a radio interview: for him to read Finnegans Wake In a group it was like a shared psychedelic experience, full of symbolism and sensations.
Another member adds that “Talking about Joyce with the group has been the most rewarding thing in my life.”, even if you have to open dozens of tabs on Wikipedia during each meeting and “feeling like my brain just took a shower” at the end of each session.
Fialka himself insists that reading was more of a communal ritual than mere literary study. He described it as “More of a piece of performance art than a book club”, a “living organism”, even a “choir” where everyone contributed their voice.
At the last meeting in October, for example, he started by inviting everyone to “take a conscious breath” together before reading the final page; then asked to recite in chorus a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, considered a “total book fan”, before participants read two lines per person.
Can you imagine that moment after so much time?
The voices of the club
Over the years, you can imagine the number of different people and stories that have come to the club. A typical member might be the fan who travels halfway across the state to participate, or the retired enthusiast who returns to the club after a hiatus.
Many emphasize that, despite the slow pace, they have forged friendships and learned a lot. "I've met a lot of people who have become my friends," Fialka admits. For Woodside and other veterans, the reading community went beyond the merely academic: When they finished the reading, there was no champagne or trumpets (Fialka jokes that “it wasn’t like seeing God, it wasn’t that big of a deal”).
Rather, it was a shared and almost surreal achievement: deciphering together lines like “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner….” out loud, laugh at the text's occurrences, hesitate until you lose track of the narrative thread.
The experience generated curiosity in the public. When people found out, the most common reaction was to think they were crazy… Even Woodside himself confessed to being used to being treated as such.
Another member commented that reading those unique pages collectively was “a perfect antidote for our times” —and how do I understand it…— where everything seems to be reduced to a tweet; Finnegans Wake instead “reaffirms the necessary complexity of human existence” according to Professor John McCourt.
But beyond the banter, what mattered was the internal process of each member. Roy Benjamin, a 70-year-old remote reader from New York, summed it up:
“Joyce is an obsession. The more you learn, the more meaning—and nonsense—it makes to you.”
An end that is a new beginning
Finally, in October 2023, the club read the last page of Finnegans Wake, completing the volume after 28 years. However, no one expected a solemn ending. As they say, the book it never ends: the last line is left halfway, to be resumed when it is opened again.
So the following month they returned to the home page. “There is no next book,” Fialka dictated. “Only this one, forever.” And so they continued, page by page, enjoying the endless journey. Again and again…
Beyond the easy joke, this book club showed that A passion for literature can be a way of lifeWhat began as a curious experiment became a shared ritual, a community that spanned presidencies, technological revolutions, and personal changes as I reread Joyce's strange stories again and again.
As Sam Slote concludes, one of the experts, Finnegans Wake “It’s not something that one person can truly master.”, which is why a collective effort is needed. And these long-time readers took it seriously. Today, 28 years after its inception, they can say with a smile: We achieved the slowest goal in the world of books.
And you? Would you join a book club like this?
Sources: I have compiled the details in reports from The Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine, as well as NPR interviews and other media such as Tendencies, who documented this real literary phenomenon.