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Sep 20, 2008

Juushika rated it:

Lena Grove travels, on foot and with the aid of strangers, through the South in search of the father of her unborn child. Her journey introduces the reader to a variety of characters, including the child's father, a man who falls in love with Lena, and a biracial man named Christmas. Like Lena, all of these characters have stories to tell, and Faulkner interweaves a number of back stories and histories in the body of this book. One of his more accessable texts, Light in August is easy to get in More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Chazzbot rated it:

Like some bemused god looking down on his creations with a trace of empathy, but also with a hint of disdain at their hopeless bigotry, indolence, and willful ignorance, Faulkner's keen, cool eye for the way humans can be chilly in its precision. But there is no denying that Faulkner knows his characters and, by extension, his readers. This is a somewhat grim novel, with little evidence of hope for any of the characters who manage to walk away, but you will be hard pressed to find a more hones More...

2 comments like (9 people liked it)

Mar 30, 2008

Corinne rated it:

Faulkner is amazing - he is always making up words that are several words put together. I like this technique because that one combination-word somehow creates a whole different picture. For example: cinderstrewnpacked or Augusttremulous or pinkwomansmelling. It's a harsh story but, I think, so beautifully written. Sometimes he writes whole paragraphs that are just a jumble of memories - like just a bunch of loosely related details in one sentence, with nothing connecting them. Those take a whil More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Sep 20, 2011

Jessica rated it:

So I'm back in school now, and for the first time in ages am being made to read books. Now I don't have any personal experience with desperately trying to get pregnant, but reading novels for school reminds me of that: there's this activity that I'm used to doing purely for fun when I feel like it, that I'm now grimly pushing through on an inflexibly dictated schedule, whether I'm in the mood or not, with this intense sense of purpose that seems to poison the whole event. The result is that I'm More...

6 comments like (13 people liked it)

Jan 14, 2008

Paul rated it:

Incredible characters, and Faulkner handles the subject of race in the south in the 20's unflinchingly. As usual, everybody in his books, black or white, is deeply flawed and superficially unlikeable, but has some quality which compels a connection. Some of the best final 50 pages of any book ever.

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 06, 2009

Colin rated it:

A couple of thoughts I’ll tie together: 1) I read a BBC article that suggests a large percentage of people keep books on their shelf to impress others rather than to read them. 2) As young students, teachers take us to the library and allow us to pick out whatever book we like (as long as we’re not just trying to avoid reading by picking out a pamphlet), but by the time we reach high school and college, it’s assigned. Though I believe an educator’s recommendation to be valuable, I believe taking More...

17 comments like (16 people liked it)

Mar 10, 2008

Tosh rated it:

It inspired Boris Vian and that's enough in my book. Joe Christmas is one of the great fictional characters in fiction. I can smell Southern culture right off these pages. Taste it and live the tale.

6 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 20, 2011

Josey rated it:

I couldn't finish it. While Faulkner is a beautiful writer he is very depressing. I lost interest after 100 plus pages, so I really can't even say that I read the book. What did me in was his flashbacks. It was okay for one chapter, but chapter after chapter revealed flashbacks, and this during the time when I found the book so interesting. My thought was to skip them and get on with the book, but so many chapters were on it. I will keep the book and keep trying.

P.S. I gave in and fin More...

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 26, 2011

Penelope rated it:

It took 2 times to finish reading it. The first time I just could not get into Faulkner;s style, I suppose. I put it aside and then went back to it again from the beginning.
The first character I encountered was Lena Grove, an umarried pregnant teenage who leaves her home in search for the man who got her pregnant. She walks for miles and miles and she meets Byron. who immediately falls in love with her, who is kind to her and finds her a place to stay in Jefferson. And then I More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 30, 2011

Dominic rated it:

Joe Christmas is quite possibly the most sympathetic misogynist in fiction. Of course most of the men of Light in August are ruthless, brutal women-haters and racists, throwing around the words "slut" and "whore" and racial epithets like it's nothing. But that is one of the reasons I love to deconstruct Faulkner's work--and if I ever get my doctorate in English, I may just write my dissertation on masculinity and Faulkner.

Yet Joe Christmas is still, despite all hi More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 02, 2010

Ann rated it:

I finished reading this and I am glad to have finally completed it; it took a long time. I had never read Faulkner and my sister had mentioned his work a lot so I wanted to check him out. The story centers around Christmas, a man who doesn't know if he is black or white. Faulkner's writing is interesting and goes from place to place, telling detailed and elaborate side stories that all come together (but very slowly). He has passages where I am not going to lie, I have no idea what is going More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 31, 2008

Alison rated it:

It seems to me that in this novel populated with ghosts and ghost-hunters, the most important ghost is the idea of essential identity. These characters drive themselves crazy searching for a Way to Be--by which they mean rest, immobility, freedom from yearning and disappointment and change--yet that kind of being doesn't exist and never has. So Hightower lives a kind of living death immersed in the fantasy of his Confederate hero grandfather who was shot for stealing a chicken; Lena and Byron More...

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 19, 2008

Steve rated it:

I’ve been working my through some great books I read many years ago. I don’t know as I’m picking up on new things reading with older eyes, but so far I’ve not been disappointed. The emotional wallop in these great novels still remains. My latest effort was Faulkner’s Light in August. It’s not Faulkner’s greatest book (see Absalom, Absalom), but it is the most accessible of his great novels. And it contains one of the saddest characters in all of literature: Joe Christmas. Abandoned, institut More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Sep 07, 2008

Stephanie rated it:

This book, and my response to it, is so complex I hardly know how to begin here. The book gave me a lot to hate--whether it was Faulkner expressing his own beliefs, Faulkner reflecting the attitudes of his society, or Faulkner revealing truths about humankind. I found myself, for example, wondering whether Faulkner really believed women and African Americans are all inclined to be as weak, violent, or manipulative as his characters...although it seemed he incriminated the entire human race by th More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2008

Michael rated it:

Read the Modern Library College Edition, with an introduction by Cleanth Brooks.
This is the most accessible epic I've read yet by Faulkner. Instead of the complicated genealogy of Go Down, Moses or the difficult stream of consciousness of The Sound and the Fury, what Light in August offers are Faulkner's patented time shifts and extreme subjectivities rendered through colloquial, usually plain speaking language. I'm just starting to wonder at the reason for this difference, but whatever it More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 19, 2011

John rated it:

One of the most powerful novels I’ve read probably since I picked up Crime and Punishment and Moby Dick last year. Light in August twines together a handful of people’s stories in the town of Jefferson – the gravid Lena, who comes from Alabama in search of the father of her soon-to-be-born child, Hightower, a disgraced preacher, and others, including a chilling (neo)Nazi type – but it really is the story of Joe Christmas, what he is (or isn’t) and what he does. Joe Christmas, despite being whi More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 08, 2008

AK rated it:

murder, intrigue, ::gasp:: fornication, lots of white men being really terrible to women and black people. i am very happy that i was not alive in the 1930s. in the u.s. and the south, at least. it sounds like a very miserable time and place.

one character, disillusioned about love and reality, thinks toward the very end of the novel "how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life." i didn't find any of the characters in this novel are especially sympath More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 21, 2008

Michael rated it:

this book is so beautifully wrought i could hardly stand it. it literally pained me, mostly because this is the book i would want to write if i was a novelist. i now understand why gabriel garcia marquez said he had to kill faulkner in his own writing, so influential were faulkner's books on his development. this book grapples with all the great themes of the south, yet is universal in its scope and insight into the human condition. i knew i was taken because of the way i suffered right along wi More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Dawn rated it:

For anyone who has never read William Faulkner, this is my ALLTIME favorite. I loved The Sound and the Fury, but Light in August is the best to start with to just dip your toes into a pond of Faulkner's reportoire' of indescribably excellent writing. The characters are so well defined that they become real people in every aspect. As the reader you get so involved with each character that your emotions want the plot to go one way or the other in their motivations or actions, yet as you know the h More...

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Jan 15, 2012

Keith rated it:

Set in the late 1920s in rural Mississippi this classic of twentieth century American literature is a true American tragedy filled with tragic figures and tragic events but told in such a mesmerizing fashion that it’s practically impossible to put down. As the story begins, Lena Grove an unmarried teenaged girl, finding herself pregnant and deserted by the baby’s father, decides to search for him and in her innocence begins to walk from Alabama to Mississippi, the direction she thought he migh More...

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Jan 01, 2012

Tyler rated it:

For many years I told anyone who cared that Light in August was my favourite William Faulkner novel. Then I must have turned into some kind of pretentious jerk, because I started telling people that I preferred his more impenetrable works like The Sound and the Fury. What an insuferable git I was. While I still love that William Faulkner pushed the boundries of how a novel could be written, and would still say the The Sound and the Fury was the greatest novel of the Twentieth century, I am also More...

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Nov 17, 2011

Melissa rated it:

I was assigned this book in an upper level American Literature college course years ago. I read part of it, but got behind on reading before the test--so I went to several study groups, took awesome notes and read the cliff notes, etc. I promised myself I'd read it later when I had more time. So currently about 170 pages into the book I've decided to call it good. I don't mind Faulkner's writing--cleaver use of words, great visual description. I don't mind stream of consciousnesses in some degre More...

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Nov 04, 2011

Debra rated it:

Light in August, depicting racism in the South in the 1920s, is a much more accessible Faulkner work in terms of plot, language, and characters, than The Sound and the Fury. Now I understand how a man who never graduated from high school merited a Nobel Prize in Literature. In lyrical prose that simply begs to be read aloud, Faulkner slowly sketches a small Mississippi town and then colors it lavishly with character upon character: Pregnant Lena who hitchhiked from Alabama to track down the baby More...

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Oct 01, 2011

Susan rated it:

classic Faulkner and a superb tale and character study -
"guileless,dauntless Lena Grove,in search of the father of her unborn child;Reverand Gail Hightower ,plauged by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a deperate enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry" amid others in the post reconstruction South.Of course the Faulkner prose " Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspe More...

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Aug 08, 2011

Frank rated it:

It'd been forever since I read Faulkner. In college I was half convinced everything I needed to know was trapped somewhere in some part of a Faulkner book, and as a consequence I sometimes poured through them without taking the time to absorb or appreciate them all. I loved the complexity but was loathe to really engage it.

So I feel like, years later, I've garnered a whole new appreciation of him from this book. I still see the parts I loved back in college, his authoritative voice, More...

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Jul 30, 2011

Farfished9 rated it:

OK so this is the first and only Faulkner book I've read. Even though I'm not giving it a good rating--I'll read some more of his stuff...what the hoo?

I want to start by saying that I'm niether 'formally educated' nor 'well-read'...uhhhh...yeah--so that being said...I thought this story was pretty dull, other than having this kinda dark quality...the word haunting comes to mind.

At first I thought like..."Oooo...lots of words...pretty, pretty words...Mmmm" I lov More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 24, 2011

Saxon rated it:

My third Faulkner in the past six months or so and out of the three I read, this was by far the most accessible. It is is also the longest, which is partly why it took me so long to read (too long on my part actually, inexcusable). Spanning almost four to five generations, Light in August is made up of various Southern characters that Faulkner spends a dedicated amount of time with before interweaving them into the plot resulting in a intricate and complex story. What we have by the end is a th More...

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Feb 13, 2011

Aaron rated it:

I spent about three weeks on Faulkner's Light In August. It is a substantial book that deserves one's undivided attention, and I was fortunate enough to have some time to devote to it.

All Faulkner novels are unsettling, but Light in August is especially so, with its biblical themes of sin, death, redemption, and rebirth. And everything is seen through the prism of race, as main character Joe Christmas is neither white enough for the white world, nor black enough for the black w More...

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Jan 31, 2011

Lee rated it:

Listen to the audiobook if you can. Light in August is essentially an old school Baptist sermon, which I have more than a passing familiarity with, since I attended a Primitive Baptist church in South Carolina all through my childhood. Faulkner exhalts in the venerability and power of the King James Bible, even as he decries the excesses of religious fundamentalism, which makes forgiveness nigh impossible and nonconformity a sin. Like any good old school Southern sermon, sometimes the different More...

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Mar 11, 2010

77ships rated it:

Faulkner’s Light in August is a lot more conventional and straightforward then his more famous complex, experimental stream-of-consciousness work. It may not be as brilliant or monumental as his better work but it is still a fine piece of writing and Faulkner remains an outstanding author. It is still far from traditional story telling.

Light in August stars Lena Grove who has travelled very far in hopes of finding the father of her unborn child, the clues are scarce, the chance are More...

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