‘It never ends’: the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake

The California Finnegans Wake reading group organized by Gerry Fialka in 2008, about 13 years into their 28-year reading of Joyce’s text. Photograph: Alfred Benjamin/courtesy of Gerry Fialka

For a quarter century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult texts in literary history.

Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years.