Ancient Authors

Posted on 19/07/2023 by Grumpa Joe

School days left me void of literature. I keep hearing about friends who read books during their early school years and even had required book lists to work from. I do not remember having such an assignment. Today, and for the past forty years I have given myself a challenge to read fifty-two books a year. To keep things interesting, I mix up fiction with non-fiction. The non-fiction category is not my favorite, but I endure it nevertheless. Then comes fiction, and I have often spoken about John Steinbeck being my favorite author. He wrote about the Great Depression and the times he lived, and I find that hearing his descriptions fascinating. Another favorite author is James Michener, who based his fiction on real history and included genealogy, geology, astronomy, astrology, ancestry, and much more in describing the era of his work. His stories were never short.

When I browse my library for material it is very easy to stay in the new fiction genre. After a few of these reads they begin to sound alike, so the next time I will head for the stacks to find an author whose name I know, but have never read. This time I decided to check out William Faulkner. His works were published in the forties, and fifties. I selected a volume which has his first four works combined into one volume. I’m reading Go Down, Moses. I suspect this story would be banned by most schools because of the use of the word ‘nigger’ to describe former black slaves who were working as free men but living like slaves in abject poverty. Faulkner does a credible job of formalizing the pronunciation of the black vocabulary, but it is not easy to read. Combine that with the very small print used to fit the four novels into one volume of 1072 pages, and it is slow and hard to comprehend.

At this point in the book I am still unable to formulate whether I like the story or the writing. I will endure this first work and move on to the next one just to save a trip to the library.

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Highly Over Rated

Posted on 11/12/2020 by Grumpa Joe

My goal is to read a book every week. In the past ten years I have not yet been able to accomplish the feat. This tear I might get to 42 books read, but perhaps could have made it to 50 if not for books like the latest one. I also have a goal to read books by authors whom are highly touted as being great, but whom I have never bothered to read. My latest read is The Sound and the Fury by one WIlliam Faulkner, who is proclaimed to be one of the greatest novelists of our time. Bull shit I say. I was over a hundred pages into the story, if you could call it that, before I began to pick up any semblance of a plot and dialog that I could understand. The best I can cipher is that this story takes place in Mississippi during the depression years and tries to chronicle life on a farm next to a golf course. The farm is staffed by ex-slaves or descendants of slaves. The language is at best an attempt to mimic the language of people who never really learned English from any one other than a slave. Faulkner does do a fairly good job of writing dialog between uneducated blacks in the nineteen twenties. In order for me to understand what I was reading I had to sound out the bubonic words in my head, and then try to translate the sound into english grammar. A book that should have taken me two days to read took seven. Add to that time some procrastination, since I wasn’t anxious to move ahead.

About eighty pages from the end, Faulkner begins writing about adults who at the beginning were toddlers speaking baby talk eubonics. The story began to read like a real story, but then it got all dicey and screwed up at the end and my conclusion is that he must have fallen off his chair drunk before he could finish it properly.

My view on this book is this: If you see William Faulkner on your child’s reading list give the child license to ignore it. I don’t think that will happen because of one word used throughout the story, nigger. It won’t pass censorship by the politically correct police in high schools. It is however, recommended by the Oprah Book Club.

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