Rating: 
Summary: Remember the big black obelisk from 2001?
Review: Finnegan's Wake exists more as an endpoint of human evolution than as a novel. Here, between two covers, lies the entire history of the world, mankind, and language. Looking at the book as it sits there on my shelf gives me chills -- I know what it signifies, and I know that it will one day be commonly considered the death of literature, having exploded language as we know it in order to usher in a more pre-verbal, intuitive culture. But have I READ it? Well... Not exactly. I've opened the book and perused a few passages -- they're surprisingly easy to comprehend if you turn off your mind, relax and float downstream -- but to be properly appreciated, the reader really must become Joyce, with all his knowledge and all his modes of seeing. My ego is too big to be subsumed by anyone else's -- even Joyce's -- but I can imagine worse careers than those of the professors who have devoted their lives to deciphering this torrent of code. I'm a Joyce fanatic, consider him beyond a shadow of a doubt the greatest and most important artist who has ever lived, and have Ulysses practically memorized. But I'm not going to pretend I have the answer to Finnegan's Wake. For now, let's just say that the book is almost like a modern art exhibit -- more interesting for what it represents than for what it actually is.
Rating:
Summary: Frabjous!
Review: I think what I enjoy most about it is that--like e e cummings--charles dodgson--emily dickinson--his joyceness gives us all persimmon to push the limits of our language. For example, any apparently misspalled weirds or seemingward aukly sentents constriction in any of our reviews here can readily be defended as missed puns in the style of Finbar--er, Flynn--er, Finnegan. O dyin' flybuzz--'tis still early brillig! Gird up your chatterjoes and follow those slithy toves? Khospodi! Bol'shoe spasibo, Dzheimz Dzhois! Into the alley of depth flowed the 600! And per jimbritt zeroing kelvin: every dewar has 500 litres! -dubhghall
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Summary: winagains fake
Review: We do not read this book, it reads us--what negative criticisms we make of it we really have made of ourselves. The idiot that neeeds to make judgments or find messages is the dupe of the five paragraph english essay with the topic sentence and the pat instrumental lack of imagination mentality that is the cause of all paralysis, pain and evil. Detractors of this work are the true detractors from life. Nobody is as pretentious as the pseudo-Holden would-be fault-finding class so actively making facism fashionable again. So long as there is any spark of consciousness alive to the soul of the inspired and the beautiful they will find the true depth and the love that is continuously overflowing from every precise and pain-staking sentence left in print by Joyce. There is nothing worse than debunking people on the grounds that they have a "superiority complex" for the complaint lodged returns on itself and is the ultimate height of meaningless ressentiment and banal venality concievable to our generally tawrdy affair of humanity. You escapists in love of logical plots and opposed to post-modernism who enforce your standards as the only ones have no need repeating your radio-show cliche rid angst here--since every Reader's Digest, daily paper, TV guide or social commentator is just as likely to have made your point for reasons quite likely some million times more forgivable. Joyce was the world's colossal novelist of some of the greatest verbal, parodistic, historic, metamorphic metaphorical powers with more learning and intellectual ability than any Einstein, Eisenhower, Edison or other. To cite a minor case: Joyce knew all of the Wake word for word, the full Book of Kells history of Ireland, the works of Flaubert, some number of operatic works, and an inexhaustible number of miscellanea. The vicarious thrills of the bourgeois hero-centered novel and attendent intellectual masturbations are met with and answered best by Joyce's book. Finnegans Wake cannot be understood without an extensive study of the literature and history alluded to, if it is to be intelligently understood--but neither can the world. Such is the parable: no free rides, no instant access: your lust for fast gratification with no sacrifice bars you from amounting to more than another nauseous busybody in the roller-coaster shows rolling obtrusively and noisily to oblivion. Vive la philosophe-roi! Vive la Ra! Select any specially dense passage of "gibberish" and I promise a slew of explanatory addendums may further your education and hopefully even edify some of your computer-manual trained interpretations.
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Summary: A fascinating patchwork of dreams...
Review: Finnegans Wake may be my favorite book of all time. Not that I completely understand it, but the incredible beauty, mastery, and especially mystery of its language is astounding to me. This is the ultimate re-readable book, since it takes many readings to even begin to make sense of it. FW is probably not for everyone, but for what it is, it is amazing. Certain passages have a quality of uncanny timelessness, despite being somewhat incomprehensible, and deep down there is a simple story of humanity. This is Joyce's great masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: Naked Emperors
Review: Admirers of this glimpse into madness must have a great need to feel smug and superior. Such "intellectuals" are painfully desperate and afraid of reality; for it is only in the realm of the naked emperors that they can pretend to be hip.
Rating:
Summary: excellent for aspiring writers
Review: This book was in and out of focus for me. I lacked the knowledge of Irish history and foreign languages for many of the references. But the moments that were in focus (the end of the book is the most sublime lyric I have ever seen) are overwhelmingly rich. If you are into writing, this book has an infinity to teach. Don't read this if you want a novel. This book is a monomyth. Spherical representation of reality. Yeah it's that sublime. Skip the muddy parts. Joyce was writing for Ireland first.
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Summary: A whimsical, thought-provoking analysis.
Review: I tought dis was claaaaaaaaaaaaassssssssssssssssssssssssss!! Joyce, he be rockin'! Wot he done wit' words was just deadly!!
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Summary: FinnegansWake <- as.novel(letters[26*runif(5ee+006)])
Review: Innocently, I checked FW out from the library in the hope that I might quickly glean a little more insight into Manannan Mac Lir. There's a very enjoyable dissertation in the University of Washington libraries that traces Mac Lir's literary metamorphoses from the earliest Irish epics through Finnegan's Wake. (Sigh) I'm afraid I just don't have the kind of time to spare these days that it would take to really enjoy FW. It looks like a great deal of fun, but it would have to replace one of the absorbing obsessions I already have (like playing better chess and writing more efficient S code), and I'm just not willing to do that. Yet.
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Summary: Lots of fun at Finnegans Wake. Hey!
Review: Finnegan. Begin again. Fin...Oh,you get the point. James Joyces' 1939 masterwork; "Finnegans Wake" seems to have been revived as neatly as poor old Tim himself. Seminal essays posted on the net by Donald Theall and others, have made the case for a new reading of this daunting novel as the primordial hyper-text. This is perfectly correct. Joyces' synaptic links and dream-scape modalities overlay seamlessly with the topographies one encounters on the web. The one difference being that, without the edifice, you, had to intuit or decipher all the puns, codes, gags, puzzles, neumonics, ironies and literary allusions yourself, (usually very late at night). Now you point & click. So hey, buy it and read it (aloud), or just fry-your-eyes. Etherway, thouarrght Chapeauleon ittisyore Roswelingtome. Wasn't it the truth I told ya
Rating:
Summary: Defies being rated, but rated it gets
Review: Finnegans' Wake is only underrated by those who either A: Think a good piece of fiction is one that should pour through their brains at the same rate as television drivel, or else B: forget that Joyce's entire career was a Work In Progress, and should be taken from start to finish. Those readers who cannot make sense of the novel should begin with "Dubliners," and when they have successfully digested that, proceed chronologically through Joyce's works; to pick up Finnegans' Wake and then try and read it without having any of Joyce's nuance of style under your belt is akin to mental suicide, and, worse, will frustrate you into not reading Joyce at all. Every word, even the hundred-letter Thunderwords, Joyce placed carefully in his seventeen years writing the novel; surely, no one of them can be easily dismissed after one or two hours' cursory reading. What is more, the book requires only that someone have the barest knowledge of Language to begin with-- it is the human sense of music, that sense from which language derives all of its power to both frighten and quell, that Joyce's prose tries to capture. Little wonder that certain episodes from the book have been called "The greatest prose ever written by a man."
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