As I Lay Dying

Hello,

For my friends reading this, you know I like to read and have more books than ought to be legal. Forget Nooks and Kindels and ebooks. I like them old-fashioned and dog-eared. The more the better. It's hard for me to name my favorite author or favorite book, but Faulkner is in the top five. It's always easy for me to throw everybody into a category like "the top five" as long as I don't have to order it further than that.

While Jimmy was living down East my first "semester" in Hungary, which is how I often think of the period from July to Christmas, he started reading some of the fiction I had boxed up and stored down there. I believe he came upon Franny and Zooey and started with that because it was handy. He told he me wanted to read some Faulkner and could I recommend anything because he knows how much I like Faulkner, and how I've read all but one or two of his works. For Christmas I put together a little packet of what I considered to be the quintessential Faulkner for somebody who's never read him and who doesn't like to read fiction. I thought I'd throw in something like Intruder in the Dust whose mystery might make the stream of consciousness technique one has to adjust to with Faulkner a little more palatable, but than I had to include the greats like The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom (my personal favorite), and As I Lay Dying.

When Jimmy came to Hungary to spend my last four months with me he asked if he could bring anything, and I said, yes, bring your Faulkner. It was easy enough for me to find English translations of the classics but I was a little tired of reading Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, much as I bow down to both those authors. I love reading Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy by choice, but when I want something new and different and am forced to choose between a the Twilight Series and reading Emma for the umpteenth time, I tend to feel a little less enthused about my old friend Jane Austen. I thought I would enjoy reading Faulkner. By the way, one of the best decisions I made was to drag A Confederacy of Dunces to Budapest! Boy, that was a shot in the arm when I got tired of the old standards.

I was reading the Sound and the Fury in Venice, and on the train ride home sometime in the early hours between Vienna and Budapest I finished it and asked Jimmy to hand over As I Lay Dying.