About the Book
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Commentary (novels not included). Pages: 202. Chapters: Finnegans Wake, Our Mutual Friend, Uncle Tom's Cabin, She: A History of Adventure, Cousin Bette, Doorways in the Sand, North and South (1855 novel), Crime and Punishment, Treasure Island, The War of the Worlds, A Tale of Two Cities, Dune (novel), Starship Troopers, And Then There Were None, The Master and Margarita, War and Peace, Heart of Darkness, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Lad, A Dog, Pharaoh (novel), Nicholas Nickleby, The Brothers Karamazov, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Red Badge of Courage, The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, A Princess of Mars, The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Time Machine, Boston (novel), Murder on the Orient Express, Anna Karenina. Excerpt: Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. 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 many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public. Despite these obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a number of key details remain elusive. The book treats, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, composed of the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many noted Joycean scholars such as Samuel Beckett and Donald Phillip Verene link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico's seminal text Scienza Nuova ("New Science"), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured. Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses. By
