Rating: 
Summary: Quite possibly the biggest literary swindle of all time
Review: I'm going to be politcally incorrect: Finnegan's Wake is a pointless soup of random words and "ideas", jumbled together in a pseudo-artsy way. I suspect that most people would agree with me in this opinion, but are too afraid to sound "uneducated" by saying so. A cocktail party: "So, you think Finnegan's Wake is hogwash? How...gauche. How naive."
Well, Finnegan's Wake *is* hogwash. I know people have devoted their scholarly "lives" to "translating" this or that or the other passage...what a sad, futile, and pathetic way to devote one's energies!
Listen: I have worked as a computer programmer. Instead of "reading" this James Joyce monstrosity, just get 10-15 different foreign language dictionaries, then program your computer to randomly jumble words together. Every few lines or so, make some random allusion to some mythology, or country, or river. You'll get something completely indistinguishable from Finnegan's Wake. (In fact, I've always wanted to arrange a test to see if the average Joyce fan could even tell the difference.)
Come to think of it, maybe that's what is so "impressive" about Finnegan's Wake...Joyce had no access to a computer!
One pet peeve I have is that everyone assumes that every nonsense word actually has a meaning in some language, and that this was INTENDED by Joyce. Well, that's nonsense. For example, the quote "bad of wind" is supposed to make us shudder with admiration for such a clever author, since (supposedly) "bad" means "wind" in Persian. Ah hah...get it? So clever! What a genius!
Well, you know what? "Bad" has meanings in other languages, too, including English. I doubt Joyce knew three words of Persian. My point is that in a collection of random nonsense words as dense as Finnegan's Wake, a HUGE number of randomly selected words and letter-groups will have meanings in SOME language. There are lots of languages out there, folks. Coincidence doesn't make genius.
I'm not saying ALL the "puns" are unintentional, but that doesn't mean that Joyce is an artist. He just had the almost unimaginable patience (bordering on obsessive-compulsive) to sit down and string together a densification wordwise palabradesic geoneodiscritization of phonemesis syllabustop and charibdistance to paragramaphone rub dub dub three men in a tubular pregnancy.
10 yrs. to write! Egads! Joyce was INSANE.
I could write the sequel to Finnegan's Wake in 1 month, with a little help from my PC.
By the way, before you dismiss my viewpoint, I will point out that I am one year away from my PhD. Of course, that PhD being in a "hard science" (i.e. physics) will let me be villified by all the "pseudo-scholars" (you know who you are: people who, instead of making their own works of art, devote years of study to someone else's creativity).
Anyway, I guess that the purpose of a review is to let someone who has NOT read the work know a little bit about it. Well, I have not read the book in its entirety. I bet the number of people OF ALL TIME who have read the entire book, living or dead, is ZERO. That includes Joyce. And the original editors of the book. Q: how many typos are there in Finnegan's Wake?
A: How would you know? Summary of my main point: there are intelligent people who think FW is pointless. You can think that, too, if you have the courage. Don't pretend you "like" the book just because you think you have to. Cheers!
Rating: 
Summary: Just read the first five pages
Review: I read them aloud with my kids, age 7 and 5. They have been force fed phonics and Dr. Seuss for the greater part of their lives. I read to them nightly, and have to compete with video games and action adventure comics for their imagination. 2 sentences in I knew I had them; They were wide-eyed. 1 page in they were slack-jawed. After 5 pages I closed the book came the myriad pleads "No, don't stop..." Thank you, Mr. Joyce, for making my children smile.
Rating:
Summary: Microscopic Manhattan Matrix
Review: OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not as good as sex...depending. Drugs...yes, unless you're tired, in which case Joyce, Sex and Drugs wont help, so play some music instead. Oh, it's music, more than it is literature, only you have to play it instead of just listen to it. More like a score of notes and symbols. Some people can't read music, can't hear the result. Hell, I can't ready music either, but this book is the only thing I have *ever* found that matches my natural astonishment at the intense immediacy of being alive in all it's frighteningly beautiful detail. If and only if you have the right type of cosmic laughter and "tape recorder" like open eyes inside of you, it will play your mind wild and hard, and you *will* smile, because it *is* you. It can ruin you, though, to "he said, she said" type of literature. Like any pleasure drug, there is an associated let down when you turn to other pursuits, such as boring things like skydiving. I've been searching ever since. *** Favorite Quotes: Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A pour soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped. A space. Who are you? The cat's mother. A time. What do you lack? The look of a queen. A sewerful of guineagold wine with brancomongepadenopie and sickcylinder oysters worth a billion a bite.... Words weigh no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops. Sexcaliber hrosspower.... The wagrant wind's awalt'zaround the piltdowsns and on every blasted knollyrock.... Right rank ragner rocks and with these rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong. Wisha, wisha, whydidtha? Thik is for thorn that's thuck in its thoil like thumfool's thraitor thrust for vengeance. What mnice old mness it all mnakes! A middenhide hoard of objects!.... Venuses were giggliby temptatrix, vulcans guffawably eruptious and the whole wives' world frockful of fickles.... The Pythagorean sesquipedalia of the panepistemion.... A round a thousand whirlingig glorioles.... A sing a song a sylble; a byword, a sentance with surcease; while stands his canyouseehim frails shall fall.
Rating:
Summary: Strange but intriguing
Review: The last and most bizarre of Joyce's works, Finnegans Wake is considered by many to be the ultimate in inaccessible literature. I've read the book in its entirety, and admittedly, I don't know what it's supposed to "mean". In spite of all the critical commentary that's been published on it in the last 60 years, it's likely that no one knows what Joyce was really getting at. The book is written in a language of humorous puns and exotic coinages which tends to obscure what little "plot" there is. Several central personalities keep resurfacing: HCE, the father; ALP, the long-suffering mother; Shem and Shaun, the brothers who are polar opposites; and Issy, the daughter. These "characters" are shown in various situations: playing games, getting drunk, doing schoolwork, etc. Sometimes they are identified with personages from legends or history: Tristan and Isolde, Adam and Eve, and so on. Some readers have interpreted the book as being Joyce's autobiography, or as a kind of heretical Bible (given the author's antipathy to Irish Catholicism). Needless to say, this is not the sort of book that most people will want as a little light summer reading. But it rewards the diligent reader who is willing to enjoy and puzzle over the linguistic experiments that Joyce set up.
Rating:
Summary: Wakes
Review: People who miss the point of FW are missing the point of Irish wakes, indeed of Irish culture; Irish wakes are a celebration of the continuity of life. This is probably the most erudite, and literate book I have ever read. Certainly it is one of the most symphonic - for this really is a book that should be experienced aloud. If Shakespeare's plays need to be seen and heard on stage to appreciate them, then certainly FW needs to be experienced aloud. The overall plot is a celebration of the cycle of life. Did I understand all of the quips, multi lingual puns, and word plays? No, but I could make sense and appreciate most of them. This is truly a superb piece of art written by a master of several languages. Was I intimidated before reading the book? Frankly I am more intimidated now after reading FW. This is one that should not be missed.
Rating: 
Summary: This Book Reminds Me of The Arghherd and Then I Was Crying
Review: book cause when you're reading it you're on the other part; they're calling it the levels. I was running earlier when this book came along. Some people in the other room were sleeping until I fell of my chair. That is. It was arguably the best moment because of smiles and of course the "Temper-Chur". Zabadoo-zing song rides twice in the loop. Finnegans Wake is a spectacular
Rating:
Summary: Lighten up, please!
Review: Have I read the Wake? Yes. Did I understand the Wake? No. Was I threatened by my lack of understanding? No. Did I feel intimidated by its author? A little. Did I feel insulted owing to that intimidation? Not at all. Quite the contrary. Does the Wake "make sense?" Of a sort. Does it "mean?" Perhaps, in the sense that a symphony or a cathedral "means." Was I humbled by it? Certainly. Did I appreciate it? Absolutely. Would I read it again? Yes, I would. Is it the greatest novel every written? Who's to say? Is it the worst? No, decidedly not. What is it then? Words on a page. Sentences. Their syntax. Their rhythm and cadence, euphony and flow. Is it anything more? Doubtless. What is that more? More than I can say.
Rating:
Summary: Unravelled Soul
Review: Actuation of 'Wake': Unravelling the soul from the eternal male-orgasm of temporality-a synthesis of anthesis; like complete, utter annihilation, the result of Anti- and its opposite, devouring each other to nullity. When, for that infinite instant, you connect to the unveiled phallus of divinity and in that harsh omnipotent instant ecstasy become nothing that is nevertheless something. On the graphic stage, the rudimentary marks of letters become the defined ingeniousness of language in cascading momentum to incontrovertible self-expression (another Grail Quest doomed to failure in the physical pursuit). The permutations of word in letter, phrase, and text provide the hit and miss of the Perfect Word (that makes both cosmos and chaos-'Chaosmos') in embryo. The Perfect Word being ever unspoken (and conversely: ever-spoken-and thus hidden in infinite division) is illiterate because it is both before and after language. Swollen and glowing clandestinely with the enticement (the promise) of the literary, the inner illiterate scythes into sensibility a billion cuts of unexpressible feeling, which are the pangs of death, the noumena of being outside of being. The embryo-illiterate is the anti-saviour (though still Saviour) of sentience, immolating intellect upon the searing combustibility of antithetical mindlessness. So words become emblems (thus amorphic and undefinable, and are shown so through ingenious distortion to dis-acculturate). And metaphors are a joke on reality as a serious world view. Thus the text is a profound banality (as a fem-divine response to the ego-emperor of vain-glory), showing nothing, giving nothing except that which is sublime in the experience of the reading as a vocal phenomenon-a reckless (and thus potentially poignant) abandonment in intonation and rhythm. Thus is the stuff of magic. And so the soul (in its aspect of the nullity of the literate-illiterate combustion) is set free of convention and the stereotypes of communication (and, consequently, monosyllabic being). The words and text fall not then on culturally limited perception but rather on reception-it is what it is, judge not, and transformation-transfiguration through cadent text brings reader to eternal fem-orgasm of the unravelled soul, and thus redemption from the Fall that words as mind-memes concrete us to (ie, harsh homo-divine eroticism).
Rating:
Summary: This book is claimed to be the worst book ever written
Review: But has anyone ever read every book? How does one know when they, having read a sentence of such a book, know its eternal value? I don't question these other people's powers--their omnipotence, their clairvoyance. I suggest that no humble "intellectual" or "closet/on-the-side/hobbyist scholar" read this--it would simply be ridiculous for an omnipotent to read when they already know everything; or a most-humble to read a humbling book. Why bother? I'm sure that they are busing writing their own magnum opus right now...
Rating:
Summary: The only book you'll ever need.
Review: This book is a drug. This book is a weapon. I'm almost surprised it's legal. But then a friend of mine tells me that people can get away with a lot more in books than they can in other mediums, because so few people read these days. Buy this book. Pick any page. Make sure it is daytime; reading late at night may cause insomnia. You do not have to finish or understand this book to enjoy it. It's like Joyce took all of human energy and made it into one huge handy random reference tome. Incredible. A sure cure for depression. When I discovered it I almost immediately felt like going out on the street and reading ramdom parts to random people.
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