Rating: 
Summary: I tried. . . .
Review: Okay, so maybe I'm an idiot, but I tried reading this thing about ten years ago. I'm an educated guy -- two masters degrees and work toward a Ph.D. -- but I got nothing out of FW. Now, I'm not suggesting there's nothing there to get, but whatever it is I just can't say.I have no idea how many stars this book deserves, so I'll leave it at five. When it comes to FW, everything seems meaningless. . . . I read the first 50 pages, determined to wade through it all. I finally realized, since I didn't have the faintest notion of what I had read to that point, I could quit and have the same experience as if I had finished it, but with less time spent and far less frustration. Now, don't get me wrong -- I usually enjoy difficult fiction. I've read The Sound and the Fury a half dozen times, for God's sake and I love it. Okay, just wanted to put my two cents in. I've just checked Terence McKenna's Surfing on Finnegan's Wake (the audio version) out from my library and will give it a listen. Perhaps I'll give Joyce a try again some day.
Rating: 
Summary: Hmmmm...
Review: Perhaps, as the conspiracy theories say, Finnegans Wake is the gospel for some yet uncreated religion, and it will remain sitting on bookshelves until some inhuman reader will take up Joyce's challenge to follow him, at which point the shade of Joyce will be chuckling, along with those of William Gaddis, Cao Xueqin, and other writers yet unborn, at the spectacle of a new prophet roaring in thunderous rhetoric of the glories of "the flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Marylbone."
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Summary: this book is cool
Review: this book is like so cool man i mean it is like watching the spice girls movie cept its in a book i really like it so i think you should buy it
Rating: 
Summary: This Book was Pretty Good
Review: I found this book to be pretty good. I din't like it as much as "The Outsiders" but I liked it a lot more than "A Seperate Piece." I was really glad that I know French when I read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Do you have no family or job?
Review: There may be rewards here for people who are intelligent enough and have the time to spend, but that's not me. I've always felt "smart." (800, 800 and 730 on the GRE's-degrees in mathematics) but this book made me feel like a mental midget. Either Joyce had an I.Q. of about 775 or there is nothing here to understand. I don't have time to find out. At least we got the word, "quark," from this book.
Rating:
Summary: don't let the door hit you on your way in
Review: (You started reading Finnegans Wake at age 13? Where were your parents, teaching the dog to write in terza rima? It's amazing you didn't catch aphasia and die.) No, it isn't incomprehensible, it's infinitely comprehensible, that's the whole problem? Gibberish? You read it, didn't you? Do you know what "gibberish" means? Do the one-star people here understand War and Peace, or even Germinal, or do they take bits and pieces for narrative and content? It's only tougher to recognize your goal as a reader...and it's the funniest book ever written. But "The Work of a Thousand Geniuses"? Sounds a bit spastic, like something Yeats would say while putting on his magic shoes. Joyce is no Shakespeare, and David Foster Wallace is all his fault, and we must never forget it.
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Summary: To paraphrase Joyce: Intrepidating
Review: As is or all is "betwixt a wink and a wake"
Rating:
Summary: Iteration
Review: FW is not a piece of literature. It is beyond literature: It approaches life and non-life. Is life easily analyzed and coherent? Is non-life? Joyce recognized the dichotomy and tried to capture the incapturable in words. He taunts the reader with meaning and the critic with nonsense. Ultimately, both the divergencies converge and vice versa. Take a look at the Mandelbrot fractal: Numbers approach nil and infinity giving alluring patterns in a mimicry of life and non-life. Joyce creates the already-created, concurrently destroying the already-destroyed. A long the... Joyce presents the question - forbidden fruit riverrun, Joyce slithers toward us - temptation past Eve and Adam's Joyce plunges the reader into chaos - banishment We find ourselves ensnared in a recirculation, striving once again for order, until we realize that we must step back in order to find Truth. I haven't even read the book, but does it really matter???
Rating: 
Summary: Contemptious
Review: The pretence here is to say that if you don't think its brilliant then the you must be a vacuous superficial fool. Its the same stunt as pulled by 'modern-art', whose lack of popularity and understanding among most people lends it a perverse exclusivity among irrational psuedo-intellectuals. No one 'understands' this book because there is nothing in it. Its not hard-going because it is so mentally challenging, its hard going because it is so uttlerly uninspiring. A dime pulp romance novel tells us more than this book can. If someone crafted your house with the same 'wondrous perception' as Joyce crafted this book, it would be rubble sunk in cement dust.
Rating:
Summary: overjoyced!
Review: What a zen master would state in a 3-line Haiku poem, Joyce says in a 700-page book, with ever dancing, ever-changing words in an amazing, multi-levelled labyrinth, more suitable and charming to Western intellect than Oriental thought. Definitely NOT the first Joyce book to read. Life is a wake, live it or krikkit!
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