William Faulkner’s Light in August is, to put it bluntly, one of the worst books I’ve read. The content is distasteful, the writing and structure poor.

A significant portion of the book’s content centers around lying, murder, prostitution, and premarital sex. Not exactly a beacon of morality and godliness. As if that were not bad enough, it is not even quality. Chunks of the text are written in an ethereal, unconventional style, as if Faulkner were attempting to write poetry and prose at the same time (and failing at both, in my opinion). Consider this first paragraph of chapter six.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than it own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.”

This last “sentence” is the longest sentence fragment I have ever read, and contains more made-up words than I have ever seen. A few more commas would not have hurt.

Different portions of the story center around two different main characters, whose lives don’t even firmly intersect. The author begins with one story, moves on to the next, then returns to the first for the end of the book, leaving the reader wondering which of the two the book was supposed to be following. Overall, it doesn’t make any particular point. It has several recurring themes, but none that really defines the text from beginning to end.

Finally, the ending itself is disappointing. After rambling through the book, Faulkner does not leave the reader with a sense of finality – or even desiring more. Rather, he leaves the reader thinking, “Huh?”

All in all, I would not recommend it. The content is not useful for self-improvement of any kind. The English is unconventional and not worthy of learning from. And the literary aspect is of such poor caliber that I dare not even call it “literature.” Unless it is required reading, leave this one on the shelf.