As an English major, its kind of blasphemous for me to have this opinion, but here it is...

I hate William Faulkner's books.

Yes. I do. I'm not kidding.

I'm just really not a fan. Maybe it's my lack of understanding and maybe I just haven't read enough of him, but I am just not a fan. I try to read it and I try to understand it but I spend just as much time reading the actual words as I do trying to figure out what the heck he's talking about.

Faulkner is known for having some awesome commentary on the South, which I'm sure has underlines of truth somewhere, but I just don't like his style of writing. He has an interesting use of grammar but in my opinion, it doesn't do much to enhance the reading experience, it just really complicates it for me.

I love classics because as a future educator, I think we can learn a lot from them. They're important to read because they help us know what things were like in previous societies and I think they're SUPER important when they're read in schools.

An issue that I have found with this is that with books like Faulkner's (specifically "As I Lay Dying" because I'm reading it now for a class) that have a lot of complicated grammar and dialog. It's very easy to lose the plot in and not exactly know whats going on. In books like that, students, especially at a high school level, are generally not going to be able to hold their attention on a book that is written in this way.

When I was in high school, a long time before I decided I wanted to major in English education, I had to read classics as well. Like most people, I hated the majority of them as well so I feel okay to say that from experience, I know most students are not able to retain the attention to read something by Faulkner.

I think better classics to stick to may be Mark Twain because he offers a similar viewpoint but in a much more comprehensible way.

Sorry to all my fellow English majors that I most likely just offended.