/lit/ - Literature

Finnegans Wake.

The hardback of Finnegans Wake.

Diamonds.

Twilight.

>>865416
oh ho ho ho you funny man

I kill you last

I think Finnegans Wake is the final boss of literature.

A book written in a language you don't speak

ok guys seriously, finnegan's wake genius has nothing to do with the story. so when you try real real hard to piece it all together, you're missing the point. it's art. read the words, fuck read it aloud, and a whole new world of looking at literature is opened up

The Voynich Manuscript. In Wingdings.

>>865470

>>865454
I tried reading it aloud in an Irish accent. It made much more sense. But I still couldn't get myself past the first couple pages.

>>865475
lol what do you mean you couldn't? just sound it out and sound retarded, who cares.

but if you don't find pleasure in that sort of thing, then yeah, what's the point

what's the big deal with Finnegans Wake?

>>865485
Have you read it?

>>865485
first sentence starts is "riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs..." and it only gets more obtuse from there.

>>865850

You call that Obtuse?

Read The Jabberwocky. Now THAT'S obtuse.

>>865866
the Jabberwocky is pretty straightforward. You can figure out the meanings of the made up words from context clues and it tells a completely linear story.

>>865866

The Jabberwocky is not obtuse. There's nothing to interpret from it because nothing imaginary in it exists, whereas that's not the purpose of Finnegan's Wake.

>>865876
>>865877

Well, you two must be the complete opposites of my personality, because I found Finnegan's Wake to be less of a struggle than fucking Jabberwocky or any of the LSD trips that Carroll had the gall to label 'books'.

>>865882
Jabberwocky is like 100 words. If you can't discern the meaning of it, and yet you can understand Finnegans Wake, you have autism.

>>865866
I don't think you get it. "Commodius vicus of recirculation" means something (actually several things) whereas the only difficulty in Jabberwocky lies in the neologistic vocabulary, and most of the words there are portmanteau words, and are explicitly defined by Carroll or are obvious given the context. Really, given the fact that the author flat-out explains what everything means, I'm not sure you could even call it obtuse.

>>865882
You have not read Finnegans Wake. The most may have done is stare at the pages in succession, letting your eyes slide past the words sequentially, and understanding none of them. Lazy troll.

>>865888

>you have autism

Oh, well, big surprise there. I'm on 4chan, that's a glaring indication of my Assburger's.

>>865898

You forgot to mention me sipping a Venti mocha latte, while balancing the copy of FW on my lap to look even more ironic and cool, and posting from my Macbook in starbucks.

>>865916
I don't think he's calling you a hipster, just saying that looking at the words is not the same as reading.

>>865916
i don't know what you're trying to say here. i do know that you seem to be arguing that alice in wonderland is more difficult or complex that finnegans wake, so that makes you either a troll or a moron.

You could argue that "In Search of Lost Time" is "harder" just due to the endurance it takes.

The Beckett trilogy is pretty dense prose as well. Henry James too, but in a completely different way. Depends on what you mean by "hard".

(Shame on the rest of the thread for never addressing the initial question)

Fuck Joyce, he was a fucking shit pervert.

Try a novel in an entirely foreign language that you have no understanding of, trying to teach yourself the language and decipher it as you read it. That might be a little harder.

>>865942

>Fuck Joyce

That is exactly what Nora Barnacle did

>>865938
thanks for bringing us back on track. I would also suggest Das Kapital, and some later marxist/psychoanalytic works like Anti Oedipus are pretty dense, but even that seems more clearly written than "Wake"

>>865942
i've got bad news for you, everyone's a pervert.

>>865949
JAMES JOYCE WILL FUCK THE FARTS RIGHT OUT OF YOUR ARSE

To be honest, Critique of Pure Reason is still pretty fucking hard for me to read. It's just dense metaphysics (not that it's bad).

>>865938
There are a lot of really long, boring books. Proust is long, many would say his writing is boring, but it's not really hard.

Finnegans Wake was hard to write and hard to read. Joyce spent almost two decades researching myths, vocabulary, magic, religion, Irish geography, Irish pop-culture, English-language literature, and non-English-language literature. Unless you speak 44 languages, it will be hard to understand. Unless you know a lot about 16th century magical thought, it will be hard to read. Unless you know all about early 19th century Dublin geography, literature, jokes, popular singers, dancers, plays, and people, the Wake will be hard to read.

Beckett was Joyce's assistant while he was writing Finnegans Wake. Beckett's job was to find words from as many of the world's languages as he could and list definitions and phonetic spellings. Joyce then created new words from those lists in an effort to condense as many of them into one wholly new Joycean word as he possibly could.

It really is the most difficult book to read in the English language, for all sorts of reasons.

>>865888
THAT IS NOT HOW AUTISM WORKS!

>>865996
*19th century -> early 20th century, sorry

>>865996
>>865866
>You call that Obtuse? Read The Jabberwocky. Now THAT'S obtuse.

>>866002
I don't care, I'm on the internet.

I think so.

Being and Nothingness.

Fuck Joyce, he was a maniacal shit pervert.
Fuck Nabokov too. He was a friendless autist enthralled by that dumb perv Kafka and his emo whining. If only Kafka's friend has listened to him and burnt his shitty work, we might be spared his fucking NaNoWriMo-grade garbage.

>>866119
To whom does that face belong?

My penis.

>>866210
Anna Karina, I believe.

>>866210
Reminds me of 99.

Eden, Eden, Eden.

Cyteen

>>866220
Thanks.

>>866305
no, he's wrong.

Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".

>>866323
pretty sure it is, dude

>>866347
go try to read finnegans wake and get back to me.

How long is the book?

>>866363
I read it yesterday.
But I've been trying for the past 5 years to puzzle my way through Alice in Wonderland, and I'm almost halfway there.

>>866380

Hmm, is this one of those memes I've been hearing about? Interesting, perhaps I should create one of my own. You just post it a bunch of times, right? That's how it works?

The Mahabhatara. Unabridged.

>>866386
The key is annoying persistence. But with all the samefagging you've been doing up and down the board, you should have no problem with that.

>>866403

could you be any more asspained?

>>866410
Where did that wacky trip of yours go?

>>866410
yeah Areucid or whatever, bring your tripfaggotry back. this is like the third thread you've called someone butthurt or asspained in.

if you want to read Finny, listen to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtOQi7xspRc
Get the voice stuck in your head.

Deciphering first sentence.
I.. I feel insignificant and... ugh.

>>866452
if it makes you feel better, the first sentence is the second half of the last sentence.

>>866452
then for god's sake stay away from alice in wonderland. that shit will blow your mind.

>>866515

i dunno i heard it was full of HOOBLEGOBLE

>>866519
>>866489
>>866505

wow, samefag takes the internet very seriously

>>866375
~700 pages

Rand is over 1,000.

Over 1,000 pages of preachy, Nazi-esque, robo-feminist, hyper-capitalist flame-spewing.

I'll take Joyce any day.

So the consensus is that finnegans wake is pretentious hipster faggotry

Read pretentious Russian authors, in Russian.

>>865411
Capital, by Karl Marx.
The sole book next to the bible I'm convinced of no soul on earth ever read the whole damn thing.

>>866170
lol, butthurt namefag doesn't know how to apreciate literature in /lit/.
Read Lolita first.

>>865475
I took a "studies in literature" class in high school and we did some excerpts from Finnegan's Wake. The teacher did just this and it did sort of work.

>>865850
Irishfag here,
This line makes the slightest bit of sense if you have been to Howth, but the whole book is just ridiculous.

Ecrits -- Jacques Lacan
A Thousand Plateaus -- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

No researching beforehand, no sparknotes, no translator's introductions, FINAL DESTINATION

>>868207
All 4 volumes

>>868207
>The sole book next to the bible I'm convinced of no soul on earth ever read the whole damn thing.

The Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth.

ok, on topic now...

Mb try philososphy, if lit is getting bland for you. Aquinas is an endurance test, given it's all so meaningless. Things get weirder from there...

>>868442
>Aquinas is an endurance test, given it's all so meaningless. Things get weirder from there...
>Aquinas
>Meaningless
>At all weird or difficult

You're joking right?

>>868452

Not really. It's soporific, self-inflected tripe. Not hard, just meaningless. Good for insomnia though, or possibly OP's endurance test?

And yes, as far as philosophy goes it's nothing much save for what it influences

>>868480
agreed

hated the bastard who made me read it

>>865882
7/3 never forget, Arcueid thinks alice in wonderland is more difficult and obtuse than Finnegans Wake.

"My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate journalistic dirty-mindedness – what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!"
- DH Lawarence, on Finnegans Wake

>>870899
>James Joyce
>old fag
okaywiththis.jpg

descartes
kant
kierkegaard

thats hard mode

You know what makes reading 'Alice in Wonderland' really easy? Reading it as a child would. That's what I did.

And in regards to FW, is it even harder than Ulysses?

>>871313
>descartes
>hard mode

lol what

>>871475
It is many times more difficult than Ulysses.

>>871475
Order of magnitude harder

>>871540
>>871549
it's not as hard as Alice in Wonderland, according to
>>865882

>>871560
Fuck you and your piece of shit forced meme.

>>871573
what did you remove your tripcode, arcueid?

Try it

pick a book from Springer's Graduate texts in Mathematics series. Good times are guaranteed.