Tag: The Culture Club

Question Tuesday: What Is Your Reading History?

Posted May 8, 2012 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Question Tuesday / 0 Comments

Welcome to a new section from my blog which I like to call Question Tuesday; each Tuesday I’ll be asking a question relating to reading and book blogging. I have a lot of questions already I want to cover but I want to leave it open for others to ask me questions as well via comments or via twitter. The first question I’m going to cover is my reading history.

While my parents go through phrases of reading a lot and not reading at all (depending on how busy they are), I was never much of a reader when I was young. I think I would read a book a year, and only because I was told I needed to read. It wasn’t till 3 years ago that I started reading (a lot). It all started with a radio segment (The Culture Club on Triple J) where they drew similarities from songs currently on high rotation with poets (mostly from the romantic era). This started my love for reading; the gateway books were Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! by Craig Schuftan (the author was responsible for The Culture Club) and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  Now I’m playing catch up; trying to read all the classics as well as newer book. I’ve set myself a goal of reading at least 100 books a year in the hope that sooner or later I might actually be caught up.


Finnegans Wake

Posted January 24, 2010 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Literature / 2 Comments

Because this book is known as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language, I thought I would explore the book a little more. No, I have not and probably never will read Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (Ok, I lie, I would probably try to read it, if my passion for modern culture continues) but I like to learn more of these types of books.

The thing I found interesting about what I’ve learnt is this book is that the entire thing is written in an idiosyncratic language, consisting of multilingual puns and portmanteau words. This to me would mean that there would never be a correct interpretation of this book; it’s just a twisted world full of no answers.

The book is a non linear story which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Which is interesting because back in the early 1900 Freud wrote a book called “The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales”. In this he made mention of dreams been a coded message waiting to be cracked. So it seems Finnegans Wake was just James Joyce deciding to follow this idea and blend it with his obvious love of puns to create a completely unorthodox book.

For a book that took seventeen years to write, it’s hard to think what the point of it is. Is this just a social experiment that Joyce was doing? Maybe he was just setting out to defy all conventions of plot and character construction. What ever the reason was it remains on of the most interesting ideas I’ve seen so far.

Just a great example of avant-garde in modern literature that doesn’t get read. I think the only people that do read it are the people fascinated with this kind of topic and the people that read it to sound intellectual.

I would love to talk to someone who’s actually read this book.

EDIT: I read somewhere that the idea of all the puns is so essentially the book never ends.

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