California book club started 'Finnegans Wake' in 1995. One page a day, every day — for 28 years

There are reading groups that go through a book in a month, maybe two. Then there’s the group in Venice, California, that started reading "Finnegans Wake" in 1995 and finally reached the last page in October 2023, nearly three decades later. But even after 28 years, they say they’re not finished. The group was started by Gerry Fialka, an experimental filmmaker who was in his early 40s at the time, who gathered between 10 and 30 people every month at a local library and began what many would see as an impossible task: reading James Joyce’s famously dense novel one page at a time.

The pace slowed further as the years passed — sometimes they would spend an entire meeting on a single paragraph. Now 70, Fialka has no plans to move on to another book. "There is no next book. We’re only reading one book. Forever," he said, as per The Guardian. The author worked on it for 17 years, including a four-year block where he barely wrote at all. "Finnegans Wake" spans 628 pages, full of invented language, puns, and multilingual references, and the group’s reading outlasted the book’s creation by more than a decade. Bruce Woodside, a retired Disney animator and longtime member, described his first impression of the book as "628 pages of things that look like typographic errors." He dropped out for two decades but returned after retirement. "Gerry’s group was just fun," he said.

He added, "In the 20 years I missed, they had advanced from chapter 1 to chapter 15." Not everyone who joins makes it to the end, but those who stay find meaning in the ambiguity. "When people hear you’ve been a member of a book club that reads the same book every time you meet, most people go, ‘Why would you do that?’" Woodside said. He’s been reading and re-reading Finnegans Wake since his teens. Another member, Peter Quadrino, joined around 2008. He used to drive three hours from San Diego just to attend. "If you’re really interested in Finnegans Wake, it’s kind of hard to find people who will talk about it with you," he said.

When he later moved to Austin, Texas, he started his own group. They’re now halfway through the book, 12 years in, and expect to finish in about 24. The Venice club once met in a library by the marina, surrounded by boats. Winona Phillabaum, a community library manager, remembered them as "people that were very intelligent and a little odd." Fialka leaned into that identity. "It’s more a performance art piece than a book club," he said, calling it everything from a "choir" to a "living organism." For the final page, they didn’t read straight through, but chanted a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, then took turns reading exactly two lines each, and that was it. They closed the book only to open it again.

According to Joyce scholar Sam Slote, there’s ongoing debate over the basics. "You have to accept that no one person is really going to get it," he said, adding that group reading is one of the only ways to piece it all together. "It’s a whole different level," he said. Interestingly, the Venice group is not the only "Finnegans Wake" reading group. Fialka said he once saw a list of at least 52 active "Finnegans Wake" groups worldwide. And while media outlets have reported the Venice group has "finished," he disagrees. "It never ends," he said.