How to read Finnegans Wake

Here is the secret nobody tells you: you cannot read Finnegans Wake wrong. There is no test. The book has resisted complete explanation for eighty-seven years, which means the difference between you and the world's leading Wake scholar is smaller than for any other book ever written.

The Wake is a night-book. Where Ulysses follows one Dublin day, this follows one Dublin night — the dreaming mind of a publican who may be called Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, in whose dream every fall (Adam's, Humpty Dumpty's, a hod-carrier named Finnegan's, the stock market's) is the same fall, and every river is his wife. Dreams don't respect the borders between words, so Joyce dissolved them: sixty-plus languages folded into English until each word carries three or four meanings at once. “Commodius” is roomy, and a Roman emperor, and a piece of bathroom furniture. All three are meant.

So don't read it the way you were taught to read. Try this instead:

1. Read with your ears, not your eyes. The Wake was written to be heard — Joyce recorded part of the washerwomen's chapter aloud, and it sounds like a river. When a sentence defeats your eyes, say it. Meaning arrives through sound a paragraph before it arrives through sense.
2. Ride, don't decode. First time through a passage, let the words wash past and catch what you catch. The annotations here (tap any underlined word) are for the second pass.
3. Trust the recurring shapes. You will keep meeting the same few people wearing different names: a father who fell (HCE — watch for his initials), a river-mother (ALP), twin sons at war (Shem the writer, Shaun the postman), a daughter made of mirrors (Issy). Four old men who comment on everything. Twelve customers. When lost, ask “which of the family is this?” — you'll usually be right.
4. Start anywhere. The book is a circle; its last sentence flows into its first. The washerwomen's chapter (I.8) is the most beautiful; the Museyroom (I.1) is the funniest; the ending (IV.1) is among the most moving pages in English. This edition's anywhere button exists for exactly this reason.
5. Use the glosses shamelessly. Toggle “what's happening?” in the layers menu and every paragraph carries a plain-English note about the dream-action. Joseph Campbell needed one; you're allowed one too.
6. Laugh. It is, before anything else, a comedy — a man wrote “when a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit” and meant the alphabet. If you're smiling, you're reading it correctly.

Give it fifteen minutes a night, out loud, with the annotations on. The book has waited since 1939; it's patient.