Just looked at Spark Notes, and this stood out to me: "The Sound and the Fury requires intense concentration and patience to interpret and understand." These are two traits I do not wish to employ at this time to this particular endeavor.
Two things in particular stand out to me. One is whether or not Quentin really is the father of Caddy's daughter. He tries to confess as much to their father before he commits suicide, and Jason hints at the same thing when speaking to their mother. Could it be what Faulkner really meant? The criticism I have seen does not seem to think so, but there is no clear evidence in the text pointing either towards that conclusion or away from it, so it remains a possibility in my eyes.
The other thing is - and I hate to admit it is something I actually like - is the way Faulkner uses Black vernacular when the Black characters speak. I find it very disciplined of Faulkner to go to all that trouble, and I wonder if it is meant as an homage or derogatorily. I tend to think the latter as there seems to be an awful of bigotry (and misogyny) throughout the novel, but it almost comes across as the opposite.
Anyway - enough of that. Onward and hopefully upward!
Next up - 1984 by George Orwell. First published in 1949, this novel is the origin of the phrase "Big Brother is watching," a phrase that has become somewhat ubiquitous in our vocabulary, especially due to all of the surveillance that has become commonplace in the last 20 years or so.
I have never read this book, but I am a big fan of dystopian novels, so I am sure I will enjoy it. I had an "argument" with a professor once when I said there is no such thing as a Utopian novel. He disagreed, but what Utopia ever works out? In every novel of this genre that I have ever read, some group is always shunned, exiled, or destroyed in order to make the world a "better" place for the elite group. Utopian? I think not.
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