It took a book club 28 years to read “Finnegans Wake.” Now it starts again.

The first sign that Finnegans Wake may be one of the most challenging books you’ve ever encountered is its opening line, which begins mid-sentence.

James Joyce’s novel ends the same way, without a full stop. Some scholars say that the last line goes back to the beginning, symbolizing the cyclical nature of time.

In California, life imitates art: a book club that has just spent almost three decades reading the novel starts all over again.

“It is not done yet; it’s an ongoing experience,” says Gerry Fialka, an experimental filmmaker from Venice, California, who founded the group in 1995. The book club met once a month to read a page or two, finally ending in October.

“It’s like a Möbius comic; it’s like the snake is eating its tail,” said Mr. Fialka, 70. “All times are happening now.”

The club is among them several around the world dedicated to collectively untangling the meaning of Joyce’s 1939 novel, which tells many stories simultaneously and is full of neologisms and allusions. Critics have weighed in on the work mind blow; a review in The New Yorker suggested that it might have been written by a ‘god, talking in his sleep’. It is not unusual for a club to take several years to read the book once.

“There are so many extreme difficulties in the text,” says Samuel Slote, professor at Trinity College Dublin’s School of English, whose reading group started working on the book in 2016 and is now less than halfway through.

“He couldn’t have counted on that many readers, or any readers, would understand it,” said Dr. Slote, noting that this ambiguity was exactly what made reading the book so appealing to the community. “No one can really control it completely.”

However, among his favorite parts of the book are two short lines on the penultimate page: “First we feel. Then we fall.” The lines are simple and undistorted, said Dr. Slote. “It is the plot of every human life.”

However, other parts are considerably more complex. For example, a sentence on the fourth page reads: “What a clash with willpower here, the oyster gods gagging fish gods!” Another line: “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!”

Margot Norris, professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Irvine, and a Joyce scholar, described “Finnegans Wake” as “dramatic poetry” that, rather than following a typical plot, plays with the nature of language.

“We get words in ‘Finnegans Wake’ that aren’t words,” said Dr. Norris, referring to a passage with apparently nonsensical sentences: “These are Roo-shious balls. This is a ttrinch. These are maretropes. This is Canon Futter with the popynosis.’

The novel, she added, “draws your attention to language, but the language will not be exactly the language you know.”

Fritz Senn, the founder and director of the Zurich James Joyce Foundationwho organizes two weekly reading groups for “Finnegans Wake,” described the communal readings as a slow working through of a religious text, often intended to be read again and again.

“You have every right not to understand it,” Dr. Fritz said of Joyce’s novel. “You do not have to be ashamed.”

Mr. Fialka, running the Venice groupsaid that over the years more than 20 people between the ages of 12 and 92 had participated, some of whom left for extended periods before returning.

The book club originally met in an oceanfront branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, but began holding its meetings via Zoom during the pandemic and has not returned to in-person meetings, in part because it now has participants outside California.

Roy Benjamin, who has been with the club for about two years and lives in New York City, said he joined to get different perspectives on the novel.

“Joyce is an obsession,” said the 70-year-old Mr. Benjamin. “The more things you learn, the more logical and nonsense it becomes to you.”

Peter Quadrino, another member, said reading Joyce created an urge to discuss his work with others.

“It always opens, fuels and stimulates the creative part of my brain,” said Mr. Quadrino, 38, who first attended some of the meetings in 2009 and recently joined from Austin, Texas, via the Zoom sessions. He has since started his own group.

In early October, more than a dozen people joined a Zoom meeting to read the final page of the book. Mr Fialka called on participants to “take one conscious breath together” before taking turns reading two lines each.

Then they returned to the beginning.

During the meeting, a member asked Mr. Fialka if he would “consider changing this format so that it doesn’t take another 28 years to pass.”

But according to Mr. Fialka, the club’s goal was never to finish the book, but to work together to absorb it.

“People think they’re reading a book, but they’re not,” he said. “They breathe and live together like human beings in a room; looking at printing and finding out what printing does to us.”