As I Lay Dying

Talk about de-press-ing. I won't lie to you; I hated reading this book. It's the story of a family that crosses Mississippi to bury their mother/wife in the town where she was born. This is not a happy book. Definitely not, as my American lit professor puts it, "comfort food lit." I'm not likely to curl up with this on a snowy day with a cup of cocoa. Frankly, I'm not likely to ever read it again ever. After studying it in class I can grudgingly admit that it has some good qualities. I won't knock Faulkner's writing abilities; I perfectly accept that he was a genius. On the other hand, why did he have to write about such horrible subjects? By the end of the book, one character is less a leg, one is in a mental institution, one is convinced that his dead mother is a fish, and one (who tries unsuccessfuly to get an abortion) ends up being taken advantage of by a pharmacist. Lovely. Not to mention, the dead wife's husband gets remarried to the woman he borrows a shovel from to bury his wife's corpse with. Not much else to say about As I Lay Dying.