I need to be this geeky more often.
Oprah just made her latest pick for her book club, and apparently she's insane. Well, we always knew she was insane, so maybe now she's senile. The pick is--get this--a three book boxed set of none other than William Faulkner.
The set includes The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. I'm not familiar with the last one, but the other two hold much sought-after places among the most obscure pieces of literature ever written, probably third and fourth only to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. There's a very good chance that everyone who reads these books in the next few months will have no idea what's going on in them. Hell, the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury is written from the perspective a retarded guy! It's amazingly written, but it's damn near impossible to follow, let alone piece it together among the other chapters. What's worse, she calls it summer reading. Summer reading is supposed to be relaxing and empty, sharing a readability level with kindling. You only read Faulkner in the summer if you're locked in a prison hotbox and the guards threw it to you as a joke.
Now I don't want it to seem like I'm against reading Faulkner, I'm only against Oprah fans reading Faulkner, and probably only half of them at that. I'll give some of the daytime television junkies credit for their intelligence, but everyone else is going to be in way over their heads.
Good luck, Oprah readers, you'll need it desperately.
The set includes The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. I'm not familiar with the last one, but the other two hold much sought-after places among the most obscure pieces of literature ever written, probably third and fourth only to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. There's a very good chance that everyone who reads these books in the next few months will have no idea what's going on in them. Hell, the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury is written from the perspective a retarded guy! It's amazingly written, but it's damn near impossible to follow, let alone piece it together among the other chapters. What's worse, she calls it summer reading. Summer reading is supposed to be relaxing and empty, sharing a readability level with kindling. You only read Faulkner in the summer if you're locked in a prison hotbox and the guards threw it to you as a joke.
Now I don't want it to seem like I'm against reading Faulkner, I'm only against Oprah fans reading Faulkner, and probably only half of them at that. I'll give some of the daytime television junkies credit for their intelligence, but everyone else is going to be in way over their heads.
Good luck, Oprah readers, you'll need it desperately.