F is for Faulkner and Fitzgerald

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.