MAY 2025: Best and Worst Book of the Month

Hi everyone. I read 5 books in May and in this post I’ll be talking about the best and worst book I read this month. A full review for all the books I read in May is found here. In this post, I will tell you why these two books stood out as the best and worst books I read this month.

Let’s start with the worst book I read in May.

WORST BOOK OF THE MONTH: The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner

This book is one of most celebrated works of fiction in American literature. First published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury depicts the destruction and downfall of the aristocratic Compson family. Notable for its nonlinear plot structure, this novel is a “complex exploration of the tragic Compson family from the American South.” The story is told through four different non-chronological points of view; “through stream-of-consciousness narratives, each revealing their own understanding of the family’s decline. The characters grapple with post-Civil War societal changes, personal loss, and their mental instability. The narrative is marked my themes of time, innocence, and the burdens of the past.”

The Compson family includes Jason Compson III, his wife, Mrs. Caroline Compson, and their four children: Quentin, Caddy, Jason IV, and Benjy. Jason Compson III is an alcoholic, and he is the symbol of the overall decay and moral decline of the Compson family as well as the fading aristocratic Southern way of life. Caroline Compson is a hypochondriac lost in her own self-pity. This prevents her from being able to take care of her children, and her negligence and disregard contribute directly to the family’s downfall. Quentin is the eldest of the Compson children and he feels an inordinate burden of responsibility to live up to the family’s past greatness and prestige. The Southern code of conduct and morality defines his world and he idealizes concepts such as honor, virtue, and feminine purity.  When he learns of Caddy’s promiscuity, his strict belief in this code causes him great despair and her disregard of this code, which gives order and meaning to his life, drives him to suicide. Caddy is the most important figure in the novel, as she represents the object of obsession for all three of her brothers. She is the symbol of the fall and death of the family. Jason’s fixation o Caddy is based on bitterness, malice, and hatred. He blames her for everything that went wrong in his life and he can’t move past this to achieve anything worthwhile in his later life. He hates all women fervently and steals money from them to support his gambling and whores. He is the most despicable member of the family. Finally, Benjy Compson is severely intellectually disabled. He cannot understand concepts such as time, cause and effect, right or wrong. Yet he is the one character that takes notice of the Compson family’s progressing decline. His disability makes him unable to formulate any response to this decline other than moaning and crying.

The first section of the novel, narrated by Benjy Compson, is told as though we are seeing all the events through the eyes of a thirty-three-year-old boy-man. Since Benjy is incapable of logical thinking, most of the section simply records sensory impressions that he remembers, so when he sees something, like the fence at the beginning of the section, he remembers another episode in his life where the same object was involved, and this could’ve happened some years ago, fifteen years ago, or thirty years old. This also happens, for example, when he hears the golfers at the beginning of the novel call for their caddie, and the word reminds him of his sister, Caddy, whom he loves more than any other person. He goes back and forth in time, and we are not always told when the time change takes place. In this section, we are always in the present. Quentin, in the second section, is Benjy’s opposite. While Benjy reports exactly what happened, Quentin reports things that may or may not have happened. He is troubled, depressed, and suffering from a deteriorating state of mind. This makes him an even more unreliable narrator than Benjy and his section is one of the most extensively studied by scholars of the novel.

The Sound and the Fury ranks 17^th on the list of greatest books of all time and 6^th on the list of greatest American books of all time (www.thegreatestbooks.org). That’s impressive, but the reasons why this novel ranks so high on this list are probably the reasons why I didn’t like this novel. Yes, the characters are very well written but I didn’t like any of them. In fact, I couldn’t care less. It is true that you’re not supposed to like Jason Compson IV, for example, but none of the other characters were very likeable either.

The novel is set in the famous Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in the town of Jefferson. This setting reflects the changing South, moving from pre-Civil War era to the rise of Jim Crow laws. Caught in the social and economic upheaval of the era, the story also highlights racial tensions and social inequalities, but I usually don’t like novels set in the American South of the early 20^th century and this was the case here. It is hard to forget the time and place where this book is set, but I still found it rather boring. I think it is mostly because I didn’t grow up here.

The writing style is very hard to get into. I had to reread several paragraphs repeatedly and the stream-of-consciousness narrative style was not my favorite. Yes, it made characters like Benjy and Quentin very unreliable narrators but I was strongly put off by this. I had to make myself pick this book up again after reading Benjy’s section. The non-chronological points of view also made the plot very confusing and if you’re already not liking everything else about the novel, this non-chronological plotline fails to make an impact.

I was not immersed in the story, and, like I said, I struggled to pick the book up again after I put it back down to read something else several times. Most of the stuff doesn’t make sense unless you’re reading this book with a guide or something, like I did, to get past Benjy’s section. But ultimately, I did not enjoy this book at all. I will not read it again.

BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, A Retelling by Peter Ackroyd

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is not only “a window into the past but also a glimpse into life in medieval times. It is a story about storytelling and it depicts life, class, romance, social cast, gender, morality, and so much more, all in a hilarious, moving, way that contextually still resonates with modern readers.  The work consists of 24 stories, each told by one of Chaucer’s spirited characters,” among them, a knight, a clerk, and a nun; other narrators include less known figures such as a reeve, a miller, a pardoner, and others.

All of these figures have one thing in common: They’re pilgrims on their way to Canterbury cathedral to visit the shrine of Sir Thomas Beckett, the martyred archbishop of Canterbury murdered during the reign of Henry II. All of these pilgrims meet for the first time at The Tabard Inn, and the host, eager to find something about the people staying at his inn,  proposes a competition: whoever tells the best tale will be treated to dinner. The eclectic cast of narrators, both lofty and lowly,  represent all levels of society, none of which are above mockery. The work is unfinished because the prologue introduces 29 pilgrims, each of which have to tell four tales apiece and the innkeeper never crowns a winner. The pilgrims also never reach their destination. But this could’ve been on purpose. The choice of who wins is up to you.

The stories are tragedies and comedies, alternating between proper and puritanical if the pilgrim telling the story is a member of the highest classes of society, like the knight, and bawdy and obscene if it is told by a member of the lower classes, like the Miller’s Tale, the most popular of the bawdy tales.

My favorite tales were The Knight’s Tale (yes, like the movie starring the late Heath Ledger, on which the movie is loosely (very loosely) based on), the Miller’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, The Pardoner’s Tale and The Nun Priest’s Tale.  

Translations are important with this one, and while I had intended to read/listen to them in the original Middle English, I ended up just listening to the audiobook version the Tales, retold by Peter Ackroyd. This translation is very well done, and I think it is a good prose translation to pick up if you’re reading Chaucer for the first time. It is very good. I highly recommend it.

Final note. The fact that both the best and worst books of the month of May were classics was serendipitous. I promise.