(OK, to be honest, this reply is mostly to fill in some of the younger members and non-native English readers, who may not know what and who Iansjack was talking about. In other words, I am explaining Ianjack's joke, which I realize is poor form, but I suspect may be necessary here. Feel free to skip it if you did get it, or if you aren't curious.)
iansjack wrote:
But probably easier than "Finnegan's Wake".
Yeah, a novel which is comprised of a single extended dream sequence, in several chapters? A bit tricky to parse. While I am hardly a scholar of
James Joyce's canon, I am pretty certain that being confused (and making up your own mind as to what it all means) is an intentional part of the experience of reading novels such as
Finnegan's Wake and
Ulysses. There is a reason why
Finnegan's Wake is often described as the most challenging literary work to read in the English language. I know I haven't finished it yet, despite multiple attempts at it.
Joyce wasn't always so abstruse; even
Ulysses wasn't quite as challenging as FW (not that I ever finished it, either, it's still a hard book to read). While I haven't read it myself, I understand that
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is much easier to follow, though this may be because it was early in his career when he wasn't ready to eschew convention so blatantly as he later did. (Also, I understand that the main character - Stephen Daedalus, who is also in
Ulysses but not as much of a central figure - was Joyce's alter ego/
author surrogate in much the same way
Raoul Duke was
Hunter S. Thompson's, and I have read that a certain amount of autobiography crept into it despite it mostly being fictional.)
Now, back to our regularly scheduled whatever it is we're doing here.