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Meet the book club that spent 28 years reading 'Finnegan's Wake'

Finnegan’s Wake,” James Joyce’s phantasmagorical 1939 novel, is considered the hardest book to read in Western canon. Joyce uses made-up languages, and words with more than 100 letters. Joyce said he was writing about a dream state.

Others, including Marshall McLuhan, who told us “the medium is the message,” call him a prophet, alerting us to how media from books to TV rewires our brains.

Some book clubs run from “Finnegan’s Wake.” But we speak to Gerry Fialkas, whose group read it line-by-line every month for 28 years. And when they finished they started it over again.

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This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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