What did he say?

Since I so often refer to you as Readers, I am going to assume that you like reading just fine, and I'm right with you. I love reading. A long while ago I was reading at least two books a week, but what with the all of the business that life provides, finding books to read on my own is one of those things that faded away. A friend and I were discussing this a few months back and decided that we should get a few people together and choose a book to read every month or so; a book club, if you will.

The first book selected for our book club was Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. I had never heard of this book before, but was excited to be reading anything that wasn't required for a class. So I ordered my copy of the book online, and before it had shipped I headed down to the library to take a look at this piece of literature. After reading a few pages, I went back to my computer and ordered a dictionary as well.

You see, Faulkner is an interesting individual. I now believe that he was one of those men who tried very hard to seem mysterious, because his whole book seems to have one central purpose: to keep me from understanding it. First, the story. Our dear friend Willy likes to start the story in weird places in the chronology and then spend hundreds of pages spinning around it in mysterious ways so by the end you may or may not have actually figured out what happened. But he has to put the story in there somewhere, so just in case he was becoming too coherent he fills each chapter with something I can only describe as thesaurus vomit. He uses a few huge and obscure words on practically every page. So for each chapter of Faulkner I end up spending a lot more time reading the dictionary than reading the book.

Every now and then Faulkner will offer me a page or two that are mostly comprehensible, but then I think he realizes what he has done and so he shakes out his thesaurus over the rest of the chapter. The most frustrating thing about this is that I am incapable of remembering any of the words I have learned in the hours I spend perusing dictionaries over Faulkner. Whenever a large word arises, I think to myself, "Oh, I saw that word two pages ago! It means... um... oh dear..." and then have to look it up all over again. 330 pages into the book, I have resigned myself to the fact that I will not understand these long sentences and so I have given up looking up every word.

I know that if I devoted more time to this book, studying it, defining terms, rereading, I could certainly master it, but luckily for me, I don't have to; this book is not in any way essential to my life. But just as lucky, there is a book that does matter, that I should devote my time and energy to, and it has a whole lot more to offer. James 1:25 says, "But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does." While I don't plan on spending too much of my time poring over Absalom, Absalom! I will be studying God's word, because it is worth it, because it gives freedom.

Truly His,
Caroline