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Todd Newberry

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Todd Newberry is currently reading

The Sound and the Fury

by William Faulkner

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Todd Newberry said: " DNeffingF

I might (MIGHT) come back to this one after cleansing my palate with a few books I understand and actually enjoy. Congratulations, Faulkner, you made me feel stupid. No author or novel has ever accomplished that. I've had trouble paying atte DNeffingF

I might (MIGHT) come back to this one after cleansing my palate with a few books I understand and actually enjoy. Congratulations, Faulkner, you made me feel stupid. No author or novel has ever accomplished that. I've had trouble paying attention to a thick or tedious tome or two, (ahem, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I'm looking at you!) but I've never been hopelessly lost for hours! I've also never rage quit a book before, but nearly one third of the way through this audiobook (yes, audiobook,) after two and a half hours of torture, I threw the thing into my mental fireplace in anger. Before that, of course, I literally cursed the author out loud several times.

I've read your reviews, fans, and I call BS. "Faulkner is a one of a kind genius." Fine. That part may well be true. I thoroughly enjoyed As I Lay Dying, but I haven't read any of his other books. The plain fact is, even geniuses go too far. They experiment beyond the point of innovation and fall right off the cliff of unreadable insanity. It happens. This, however, is the part of your reviews I find maddening: "Yes, the first section is unintelligible nonsense, but if you read the whole thing, the beginning will start to make a little more sense." A little more sense? I don't have time for that when there are literally thousands of books out there that don't ask such things of me. besides which, I don't believe you. I had so much trouble following the "narrative" that there's little chance I'll remember enough to understand any of it after finishing the next six plus hours.

Here's everything I know so far (and if gibberish counts as spoilers, then I guess there are spoilers ahead, but believe me, I'm not giving away anything I would consider a plot point.) The narrator, whose name I finally figured out is Benji, has special needs. Sometimes he's thirteen, sometimes he's thirty-three. Are there other time periods before or in between? Crap if I know. There are time skips, but not in a fun, Kurt Vonnegut kind of way. No. It's more of an I-have-no-idea-when-or-where-we-are-unless-they-happen-to-mention-the-number-of-candles-on-the-cake kind of way. Benji cries and throws fits when the weed he's playing with is taken away. He blacks out sometimes, I think. He has siblings and possibly a servant or two, but I'll be damned if I know who's whom. Some take care of him so he doesn't scream; some actively try to make him scream. His mother changed his name at some point? Is that right? The parents kick the kids out of the house because they have company, but I don't know who or why, and one of the kids is trying to sell a golf ball for a quarter so he can go to a show or a concert or something. That's everything I know from the entire first two hours!

The second section didn't begin much better. Had my brain secretly given up on trying to make sense of things, or was the next half hour as much crazy pants babble as the first section? I honestly don't know. Either way, I'd had enough.

I doubt I'm through with Faulkner. Like I said, I may even try to finish this one down the line out of sheer obstinate, completist compulsion, and after enjoying As I Lay Dying, there are still several more I'd like to check out before giving up entirely. The first third of this particular work though was terrible. I'm six and a half months from finishing my goal of reading and listening to five-hundred books and audiobooks in five years. I'm very proud of that. I haven't quit partway through a single one this entire time until now (unless you count the glitched copy of Steppenwolf I haven't yet replaced.) I even suffered through the entire Maze Runner trilogy and the increasingly inane Jumper sequels. (Spoiler: Instead of saving lives or robbing banks or something, a teenager with super powers uses her teleportation ability to start a satellite retrieval company. Seriously. It's so incredibly boring.) ...more "

Jun 14, 2022 04:58AM · see review

Todd’s Quotes

“Forget everything else. Forget everyone else. You're exactly my kind of girl.”
― Amie Kaufman, These Broken Stars

tags: forget, girl, love, relationship

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“I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.”
― Stephen King, It

tags: dreams, forget, remember

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“The ability to memorize a very large number of things is not nearly as valuable as the ability to tell what is worth remembering.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: distraction, focus, forget, forgetful, forgetfulness, information, memorize, memory, remember, wisdom

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“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

tags: change, forget, time

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