First, a few starring points

Over the past 12 years or so, I've flirted a lot with Finnegans Wake.  I've thought about James Joyce's legendarily unread masterpiece off and on, and I've skimmed through short passages of the book here and there.  But every time I've determinedly sat down to read it from the beginning, I've gotten a headache halfway through the first page and given up.

I've read Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.  On the strength of those three books, Joyce is my favorite author.  Having recently finished reading Richard Ellmann's authoritative biography of Joyce, and recognizing the fact that today is the 75th anniversary of the Wake's publication, I've decided that now's as good a time as any for me to finally dive into it.

Given the complexity of Finnegans Wake (which is written in kind of a dream-state version of English that uses infinite variations of spelling, is loaded with puns, and features liberal incorporation of words from other languages) and inspired by Frank Delaney's weekly Re: Joyce podcasts, in which he guides listeners through Ulysses while "unpacking" that challenging novel's dense language, I've decided to adopt a slow and careful approach to reading Finnegans Wake.  By slow, I mean that I plan on reading about two pages a day.  By careful, I mean that I'm going to be getting a lot of help from those who have entered into the Wake before me.

I intend to read each day's passage out loud to myself (the style of the Wake's language seems to demand that its words be heard as well as seen).  After my first run through, I will supplement my reading by referencing the relevant passages from three books:

• Roland McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans Wake, which offers line-by-line notes on the text of the Wake.
• Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, which takes readers through the Campbell and Robinson's interpretation of the Wake.
• William York Tindall's A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake, which, similar to the Skeleton Key, also breaks down the Wake in an attempt to guide the "average" reader through it.

(Additionally, I've also just finished reading James S. Atherton's The Books at the Wake, which details the many literary sources Joyce used as a foundation for his book and almost constantly alludes to throughout the work.  It served as a helpful prologue to my attempt to make it through Joyce's book.)  I recognize that these might be older and less-popular guides, but they looked helpful to me, so I'm going to roll with them.

After I've gone through these secondary sources, I plan on rereading the day's pages, hopefully with a decent level of general understanding and in a better mindset to appreciate the passage.   

As part of my trip through the Wake, I'm going to chronicle each day's reading on this blog.  At a pace of two pages a day -- plus the inevitable days here and there when I won't get the reading done -- I figure I'll be done with the book in about a year, hence the blog's title.  This will be a sort of reading diary -- I don't envision getting too in-depth or scholarly, but rather will just kind of riff on what I've read.  Nothing's set in stone, so things might develop one way or another as I go along.  Ultimately, I hope that this might serve as encouragement for those who, like me, have always wanted to read Finnegans Wake but haven't yet taken the plunge. 

So, yeah, here I go . . .