Well, maybe not the "best" book, but still.... Finnegans Wake is quite an experience. Reading it twice in a row (after having read it once back in the '80s) was something I never dreamed I'd ever do, and I definitely feel like my brain has been put through the ringer. I loved it. And I didn't even obsess over minutiae or layered meanings of individual words... my copy is astonishingly clean of annotations. I just let it wash all over me. Listening to Patrick Horgan's recording while reading it was definitely a plus... you need both your eyes and your ears for this... I find that reading it aloud to myself is often too distracting because I run into too many words I can't pronounce, and it impedes the flow... I also got a lot out of both Epstein and Kitcher's books... I especially liked Kitcher's approach to teasing out how what he terms the "Joycean virtues" ("kindness, understanding, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness" --p. 250) are expressed in the Wake. I also appreciated Kitcher's perception of the dreamer (the reader? whoever is "narrating" the novel) and the dreamer's "dreamwork":
The dreamer is an aging man for whom there arises a cluster of overlapping issues about individuality and conformity, about public life and private life, about creativity and intimate relationships, and about the existence and value of enduring love. (Kitcher, p. 57)
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