Hell, my wife absolutely hated that book. A child had read the first page, but it was an adult who closed the back cover and leaned back with a dreamy sigh. I emerged on the other side of that slim volume a different person. I surely read every page more than once, unlocking new doors in my mind with each nugget of genius crafted from the great word-hordes of old. Though the book clocks in at a svelte two hundred ten pages, it contains multitudes. I found myself rereading sentences and paragraphs and entire pages several times because, though I understood all the words, they were locked together in hermetic patterns, and I needed to level up as a reader to make sense of them. Faulkner has a way of cramming countless clauses of impenetrable brilliance into sentences seemingly without beginning or end. Everything I thought I knew about reading was a lie, and this new truth revealed an entire world that had been lurking beneath the surface.Īs much as the unusual narrative structure, it was the writing that made me. It changed me in ways it took a long time to unravel. It was like all my reading life I had just been making out with books, maybe a doing a little dry-humping, but suddenly this book was making love to my brain. There are fifteen point-of-view characters-FIFTEEN! Who does that? And most importantly, why? And oh, the best chapter in the whole book? I can recite it from memory: But the narrative of As I Lay Dying was almost incoherent to my teenaged brain. I sort of assumed that was the whole reason books existed.
I was used to reading books that told stories. And so, I checked William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying out of the library, and my world changed. But when a friend of mine started talking about a literary book he was reading that blew his mind and was NOT for school, I got more than a little curious.
I did enjoy some of the classics I read at school, and I have fond memories of tackling Dickens as a freshman, along with the entire Bible (Catholic school, whaddyagonnado?). I was your average high school nerd, more interested in D&D than books, though I read a fair amount of fantasy and horror and the like. How I lost my Literary Virginity By Dan Fitzgerald
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