Textual scholars have compiled an amended version of Finnegans Wake.

Good, this will give Joycean scholars something to discuss and the rest of us something to ignore.

It’s Friday. Behold the melange.

Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon spent 30 years pouring over drafts of James Joyce’s least comprehensible work. Their research lead to 9,000 alterations in the amended Finnegans Wake.

In an interview, Rose said, “Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.”

No, he didn’t. But that would be awesome. What Rose actually said:

Because of the difficulty of the language of Finnegans Wake, the syntax is not immediately apparent and the syntaxical coherence of the book was effectively lost when it was brought into print. This coherence has been fully restored in the new edition and results in what can be called the first definitive edition of Joyce’s final masterpiece.

Actually, the syntaxical coherence was lost when Joyce wrote the book; and you couldn’t restore its coherence with a decoder ring and a babelfish.

Moving right along: We didn’t write anything about Dr. Seuss’s birthday this year. (It was Tuesday.) As consolation, I offer Shirley Hughes’s top 10 picture book characters. (No Dr. Seuss characters make the cut, but Babar does.)

I have nothing to say about Charles Pellegrino that hasn’t already been said. I will grit my teeth when he receives a six-figure advance for his next book.

Finally, The New York Times explains e-book pricing.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald

P.S. For the record, Tricia’s absolutely right. It was jarring to have to stop every few pages of Moby Dick and write my thoughts. By the second day, I decided to only blog between chapters. It felt like less of an interruption, then.

If anything, I underestimated the physical challenge of trying to read for 13 consecutive hours.