The thing is i was reading a piece by Anthony Burgess comparing Hopkins and Joyce the other night:
"Hopkins and Joyce wanted genuine sonic simultaneity, and they could achieve it only by compressing more than one meaning into a single word or phrase.
When [Hopkins] writes ‘treads through, prick-proof, thick, thousands of thorns, thoughts,’ he evidently sees the thorns and thoughts as one thing, but he dare not write ‘thornts.’ That kind of refashioning had to be left to Joyce in Finnegans Wake."
And I thought 'oh wow that's really interesting'. But then Burgess quoted one sentence from FW and I couldn't understand it at all.
So the idea of reading 700 pages of stuff I can't understand at all seems like very hard work.