Finnegan

Though the sentences flow and you can skip through the words you know to find the basic meaning, I feel as if its more like reading a foreign language you barely know rather than English. I feel like underneath the basic story there are these intricate weavings of connotation that I cannot even begin to understand because I get distracted by trying to figure out the words themselves.

“The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words…”

Which basically means he wrote this book in a language that he invented comprising of proper English, words that are working toward being assimilated into mainstream English, multiple foreign languages, and words combined to make new ones, all arranged in elaborate puns.

Here’s a website where they attempt to create a sort of glossary, but in fact end up rewriting the book in the footnotes.

http://www.finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm

I figure that if you publish a book, your goal is to have it read by a lot of people. I can’t quite figure out why Joyce would make his book so incomprehensible.

I found another website that takes a much different approach toward comprehension too.

http://www.gadflymagazine.com/a-philosophical-framework-for-understanding-finnegans-wake/

I started out thinking that it's probably better to just look at the basic plot and not worry about understanding every pun, but as my english teacher told us back in high school (after warning us about the perils of trying to read this book) "he took seventeen years to write it, so you'd better take at least that long to read it".