Just before St. Patrick's Day 1999, Bill decided that the time had come. He called together about a dozen Joyce enthusiasts, literary types and well-rounded scholars. We were determined to pool our considerable intellectual resources and, as a committee, actually read the formidable tome.

At that first meeting we began by taking turns reading aloud the first of the 628 pages. Only a few people had brought along copies of the book, but by the next meeting we were better prepared. After struggling through those first seemingly unintelligible pages, we had come to realize that reading "Finnegans Wake" without assistance was akin to crossing the Sahara without a camel. In addition to personal copies of the novel, each of us hauled in a veritable reference library, which we spread before us like winning poker hands.

We all had copies of "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake," the classic 1944 study by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, and "A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake" by William York Tindall. It was fortifying to read in the introduction to Tindall's 1969 guide that he had based his work on the achievement of his own "Finnegans Wake" reading group of fellow Columbia University graduate students, formed just one year after the book's 1939 publication. If they could muddle through it, without even the invaluable "Skeleton Key" to help them, then by golly, so could we.

We began with the same resolute spirit displayed by Stephen Dedalus at the end of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." We felt we were doing a noble and brave thing, though we never dared to compare ourselves to the Wake's first readers. To our mind they were just as courageous as the first people who ever tried eating lobster.

We went round and round about Giambattista Vico and Giordano Bruno, bygone philosophers whose theories served as the framework for the Wake, much as Homer's "The Odyssey" had for "Ulysses." We expounded upon the nocturnal, dreamlike nature of "Finnegans Wake," as opposed to the waking moments of Leopold Bloom et al., described in "Ulysses." With the help of my handy guide, Roland McHugh's "Annotations to Finnegans Wake," which explicates the book almost word by word, we sorted through some of the many layers of meaning woven into the Joycean myth of Everyman/Finnegan.

After we'd been meeting every few weeks for two months, we felt so confident of our growing understanding of Joyce's magnum opus that we engaged in a rousing game of "Finnegans Wake" charades. We divided into teams and drew from a hat snippets of language from the early chapters. We took turns acting out the expressions while the others guessed. Mine was easy enough: Phoenix Park. I mimicked a bird swooping up from the fireplace. Katy chose to illustrate the phrase "by a commodius vicus of recirculation" by pretending to sit on a toilet.

We solved each puzzle in minutes flat and felt ever so clever. I crowed, "I'll bet we're the only people in the world playing 'Finnegans Wake' charades right now!" We spent the rest of the evening in smug conversation about facets of "Finnegans Wake" while sipping from bottles of the Irish nectar Guinness stout.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"