William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald are among my favorite authors.
I read The Great Gatsby as a teen and countless times since. The thing about this book is it is an easy, smooth read. You can see the characters even though they live in another time. I think I read this book when I was twelve. It made me love literature.
I love William Faulkner's short stories, "A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning" in particular. I think it's cool how he created a small town where generations of characters are interdependent and intertwined. Reading Faulkner absolutely takes more work than Fitzgerald, but it is so worth it.
If you like a more challenging read or are a writer working on point-of-view techniques, I would absolutely recommend As I Lay Dying. The chapters are told from a different character's perspective, which is a little hard to get used to at first, but is totally brilliant. The plot is this: the mom is dying and asks the family to take her body to her hometown to bury her after she dies. At one point, they drop her corpse off a bridge. Ooops. This is exactly what my family would do. I'm not sure if it's meant as a comedy, but I really enjoyed it as if it were.
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ReplyDeleteI've enjoyed looking over your A to Z posts, and I knew I had to comment on this one. I fell in love with Fitzgerald in high school and had a massive book of his short stories. As a good southern girl, Faulkner is a given. Great post!
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