Today is the day that I write about finishing book #100, which I finished approximately 2 weeks ago now.

BOOK 100! BOOK 100! BOOK 100!!!!

I feel like there should have been some kind of a ticker tape parade or something to follow me around after I finished it, instead I had a large feeling of self-awe, but also a lot of stress and some depression, as I still have quite a few more to read. I received a few positive emails back after I wrote a mass email to my friends and relatives describing my accomplishment, but it still didn't lessen the load in terms of how I feel about all of this. Am I crazy to continue to pursue working on something this huge? Is it a pipe dream? Will absolutely nobody care? Does it really matter? Is it too much freakin' information? Will it really liberate me as much as I hope?

In the past 2 weeks, all of these questions have plagued me a great deal, and caused not just a little anxiety about my future regarding "the project". By calling it that, it makes it seem so ominous...I feel like I need time, and lots of it, to be fair to the books, and myself, and work on this goal. Many adults don't even read 100 books in their lifetime, let alone 100 of the greatest novels of the last 100 years (though that is a debatable point). I am at a loss as to what to do. I want to quit my job, and devote my life to this full-time, but I have no alternate income with which to do that. I am not independently wealthy, and I'm not moving back in with my parents. At this point, I just need to keep on trucking and hope that maybe around Christmastime I will be close enough to my goal to start to look for some kind of agent. How does one even do that???
Argh. Well, I suppose I should just keep trucking along and cross those bridges when I get there. I have a week of vacation coming to me, and I will spend it relaxing, reading and catching up on whatever writing I can hopefully accomplish. It's my time to just stop and read...

Back to book #100. Book #100 was fittingly enough, William Faulkner's The Reivers. Fitting enough for several reasons, I suppose. What I wrote in the email to my friends was that monumental milestones deserve to be marked by monumental writers, which of course I believe Faulkner very much is. It was also important to me to have a writer that I love so very much, and who has shaped much of my outlook on Western literature be that line in the sand that needed to be drawn. I suppose if I still had a Toni Morrison book or if Harper Lee had written another novel, I would have had a tougher decision to make as to who would be #100. As it stands right now, Faulkner's A Fable will be my final book in the project. It's a tough read, from what I've heard, and I think it would give me great satisfaction to finish off with a difficult, yet rewarding read.

I had, frankly, forgotten about Faulkner's writing style, and about what it feels like to read his style. Actually, let me re-qualify that. I hadn't forgotten about his writing style, but I HAD forgotten about what it feels like to be immersed in his books. Because, of course, that is exactly what it is like to read a Faulkner novel. It is like going to a country where you perhaps only half understand the language, like Germany or the Netherlands, where you have maybe heard a handful of words before and recognize some of the food that the waiter puts in front of you when you eat in a restaurant, but you're never exactly sure what's going on and are at the mercy of whatever situations arise while you there. You are immersed in a world that is swirling with activity all around you, but over which you have very little control or any idea as to what will happen next. Much like life, I suppose. You have to have a lot of patience to read a Faulkner novel, and that is what I had forgotten. I spent much of the novel reminding myself of the reward that would come at the end of this particular book, and I also made sure that I didn't read the book unless I had a decent chunk of time in which to do it, and focus. William Faulkner's writing always requires a great deal of focus. Just read 20 pages of The Sound and the Fury and you'll see what I mean.

The Reivers won Faulkner the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Unless I am mistaken, there is only one other time so far that a Pulitzer was awarded posthumously in the fiction category, and that was for Confederacy of Dunces(which I have yet to read), a book that was finally published years after the author's suicide, at the urging of his mother. By the time that The Reivers won the Pulitzer, though, Faulkner had already been awarded a Pulitzer for A Fable and had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Reivers is a good novel, I'm just not sure how I feel about it in relation to As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, which are, as far as I'm concerned, AMAZING. But, it has many of the qualities of Faulkner-ian writing that I love so much, and is an entertaining read.

The Reivers is about a road trip. Faulkner does a great job with road trips, which in non-fictional life as well are rarely free of some kind of excitement or even disaster. As you mentioned, Kate, what Faulkner novel isn't about a road trip? If As I Lay Dying is probably the quintessential disastrous road trip, The Reivers is like the Deep South version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The story is told in flashback form, about a man when he was a small child, growing up in an indistinct period of time in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a county that Faulkner made up, to resemble Oxford, Mississippi and the surrounding area where he lived. The entire novel doesn't span more than a few days. Lucius, the main character, as an older man gives some background on the people who will figure more prominently in the road trip as it continues throughout the novel, but the events that take up the meat of the novel definitely don't last any longer than a week. Lucius Priest's maternal grandfather dies, and the parents have to go away to the funeral. The children are sent to stay with an aunt, but Lucius, an eleven year old boy seduced by the idea of adventure by his father's half-native servant, through a web of lies, deceives his aunt and goes of on a road trip of an unprecedented nature...:) The events are those that only Faulkner could envision and write about. The two men, one certainly more schooled in the world than the other, have a rough time getting to Memphis, but they do, and on the way discover another servant who is a stowaway in the car. Ned is the one who causes the big troubles. When they are all supposed to be spending the night at the whorehouse that Boon is familiar with, Ned sells Lucius' grandfather's car, a car that the grandfather wasn't too into but had as a status symbol mostly. He sells the car for a horse. Now, how the hell is everyone supposed to get back home? Thus the adventure of the novel ensues. In order to get the automobile back, they decide to travel to Parsham and race the horse, to win enough money to buy back the car...It is hilarious, and confusing at times, but even though it is quite bizarre, it is also highly believable.

Perhaps Faulkner's greatest gift to Western literature, and maybe the reason why so many people have a hard time stomaching him, is his ability to write how we really think, and how we really tell a story. When you're telling a story to a friend of yours over coffee or over the phone, it's full of stops and starts, and asides, and "don't you remember so-and-so? They used to date so-and-so.", etc. Human beings rarely tell a story linearly, unless they are set up to do it in some kind of show format, like the storytellers of old, or in a play or a movie. These however, are all staged. Faulkner, who I believe truly mastered the stream of consciousness technique, brings this style of writing into his characters' storytelling methods, as in The Reivers. Faulkner's writing is very, very real. And, I think this method is very condusive to realizing the wealth and depth of human emotion. I suppose, however, that what I also wish is that it was a style of writing more people were used to, so that more people in this era could appreciate him. He is not without some faults; as I read this particular book, perhaps it is because I'm older and a little wiser than I was when I first started reading Faulkner at the tender age of 17, but his characters could be construed as racist, and some things that are said by the characters are brutal observations of the world, perhaps opinions of the author. One could also argue, however, that he is using his characters to depict the world in which they lived in all of its varieties of truth, as unsavory as that may be at times. The South, and the rest of the U.S. for that matter, is full of racists, of bigotry, of hatred, and as we all know, it is best to bear witness and decide not to take that path ourselves, than it is to just shove our heads in the sand and pretend it's not happening.

Great quotes are found here, that are funny and blunt, and nowhere near as long as the ones from Vanderhaeghe's book.

The first one is a when Lucius, as an old man is talking about Mr Binford, who could be considered the pimp of the "boarding-house" that Lucius as an 11-year old boy and Boon and Ned are at. He says:

"There were more than enough places at the table, even with Otis and me. Minnie was still bringing things, all cold--fried chicken and biscuits and vegetables left over from dinner, except Mr Binford's. His supper was hot: not a plate, a dish of steak smothered in onions at his place. (You see? how much ahead of his time Mr Binford was? Already a Republican. I don't mean a 1905 Republican--I dont know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any--I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a man who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooed Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned how to read and write.)" (101-102)

Another one that I like was Lucius' statement about mules. He launches into a big ranking of several animals and their level of intelligence, of which I won't reproduce all of it, since it is extremely long, but the first paragraph is particularly great.

"You were born too late to be acquainted with mules and so comprehend the startling, the even shocking, import of this statement. A mule which will gallop for a half-mile in the single direction elected by its rider even one time becomes a neighborhood legend; one that will do it consistently time after time is an incredible phenomenon. Because, unlike a horse, a mule is far too intelligent to break its heart for glory running around the rim of a mile-long saucer. In fact, I rate mules second only to rats in intelligence, the mule followed in order by cats, dogs, and horses last--assuming of course that you accept my definition of intelligence, which is the ability to cope with environment, which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty." (113-114)

This next quote I felt like I needed to put down, because it was particularly repugnant to me. But, one of Faulkner's characters said it, and I'm sure that there are some men who feel this way.

"'...And meanwhiles, stop fretting about that gal, now you done said your say to Boon Hogganbeck. Hitting a woman dont hurt her because a woman dont shove back at a lick like a man do; she just gives to it and then when your back is turned, reaches for the flatiron or the butcher knife. That's why hitting them dont break nothing; all it does is just black her eye or cut her mouf a little. And that aint nothing to a woman. Because why? Because what better sign than a black eye or a cut mouf can a woman want from a man that he got her on his mind?'" (249)

Another quote that I liked was from Ned, the black man who gets Boon and the young Lucius into this mess. He's explaining to Colonel Linscomb about how the series of events actually transpired.

"'With my people, Saturday night runs over into Sunday.'

'And into Monday morning too,' Colonel Linscomb said. 'You wake up Monday morning, sick, with a hangover, filthy in a filthy jail, and lie there until some white man comes and pays your fine and takes you straight back to the cotton field or whatever it is and puts you back to work without even giving you time to eat breakfast. And you sweat it out there, and maybe by sundown you feel you are not really going to die; and the next day, and the day after that, and after that, until it's Saturday again and you can put down the plow or the hoe and go back as fast as you can to that stinking jail cell on Monday morning. Why do you do it? I don't know.'

'You cant know,' Ned said. 'You're the wrong color. If you could just be a nigger one Saturday night, you wouldn't never want to be a white man again as long as you live.'" (276)

The last quote I'll put in here comes only a few pages from the end of the novel...It is when Lucius finally has to face the facts with his grandfather, after everything has been sorted out and resolved, post-horse race.

"'Come here,' he said.

'I cant,' I said. 'I lied, I tell you.'

'I know it,' he said.

'Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something.'

'I can't,' he said.

'There aint anything to do? Not anything?'

'I didn't say that,' Grandfather said. 'I said I couldn't. You can.'

'What?' I said. 'How can I forget it? Tell me how to.'

'You can't,' he said. 'Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable.'

'Then what can I do?'

'Live with it,' Grandfather said.

'Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see I cant?'

'Yes you can,' he said. 'You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should. Come here.'" (286)

It is not uncanny to me that both book #99 and book #100 have a theme of boys growing up and learning about how the world really works, and where their sense of morality fits in. Young Lucius has much to grapple with as he ends up being the jockey in the horse race, but also comes to the defense of a whore on behalf of her lady-ness(for lack of a better term). I went on a road trip in order to move out here, with two other people who are still very dear friends to me, and I learned a lot about them, and myself. Faulkner's The Reivers showed the characters in his Pulitzer prize-winning work something about themselves, too.