The idea of a book club is simple enough: on a regular interval, the group decides to read a particular book, and when they convene, they talk about it. However, one particular book club has been talking about the same book for over 28 years, and they are only about to finish reading it. That book is James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake which many consider one of the most difficult novels to read because of its unconventional storytelling. And the book club, the Venice-Wake group, is a project launched by filmmaker Gerry Fialka out of curiosity. He says of the origins of the book club:
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“I thought, ‘Well, the only way I’m gonna learn ‘Finnegans Wake’ is by diving in. I’m not a scholar. I’m not an academic. I haven’t even read any other Joyce. And I just said, ‘Why not?’ So it’s been 28 years and it really blossomed into a lot of things.”
The reason why it has taken the book club 28 years to finish reading the book stems from their choice to read it at a slow pace. Fialka quips that they would read one page and proceed to talk about it for two hours. Considering that the length of the book is 628 pages, it’s no wonder why it took them almost three decades to go through the whole book. Now, that they’re about to finish, one wonders what book they will read next, to which Fialka cheekily replies:
“No, we’re never done. The same thing will happen next month,” he says. “We’ll read page three again next … There’s nothing different really.”
– via Dave Barry’s Blog
(Image credit: Burst/Pexels)
Source: neatorama