It comes in at #6 on The 100 Best Novels list compiled by the Modern Library, yet it doesn’t appear at all in the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time list compiled by the Guardian in the UK. It also appears in the un-numbered 100 Best Books of All Time on Wikipedia . . . but who really cares what it says on Wikipedia, right? Time magazine’s un-numbered All-Time 100 Novels list (from 2005) calls it a “brutally moving epic of love, lust and endurance.” Yet, despite all that high praise – well, except from the Brits at the Guardian, who instead included As I Lay Dying, which is a great novel, at #52 – I had never read The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner. While I’m being honest, I’ve never read Absalom! Absalom! either. (However, in an utterly defensive attempt at Southern literary redemption, I have to add here that “Barn Burning” is probably my favorite short story of all time.)

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