Flannery O'Connor is the bestest. I have her complete short stories, and it blows me away.

I'm not the biggest Faulkner fan, but I have to say that I love his novel Absalom, Absalom! It gives a sort of mythic account of the American South.

THAT SAID, while I love that novel from Faulkner, it does little that Willa Cather's A Lost Lady doesn't already do in a much-shorter, more comprehensible manner. Cather is severely underrated, I feel.
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I couldn't stand Faulkner's ridiculously complex language and syntax. I'm starting to enjoy it more, though. Still not sure I'll be picking up the Sound and the Fury for a pleasure read (already read it twice for school), but I'm enjoying him in small doses.

In researching him, the thought struck me that one of the reasons lit geeks like him so much is his Tokien-esque nerdcreation of a county, complete with maps and charts and family trees showing how stories interlap, in effect creating a sort of Southern Mythos.

My only Cather is My Antonia and I liked it.
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"Coming, Aphrodite" by Cather is a good short story.
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I am on George Shuman, Sherry Moore series.
Good so far, on book 2 of 4.

If you like thrillers, Steve Hamilton Lock Artist was awesome :-)
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I'm reading Joseph Stiglitzs "Freefall", who's a fav of the lefty Keynesian crowd. It's his explanation of what happened leading up to and precipitating the meltdown of the financial markets back in the Fall of '08, among quite a few other topics.
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Just as an aside, I found this brutal quote from Hemingway on Faulkner:

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
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I love the n00bs "chiming in 'randomly'" dropping science.
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I sort of agree with his sentiment. The thing that frustrates me about Faulkner and Joyce is they show they can write something enjoyable to read with their short stories. You wish they'd give you that in a novel. When you read That Evening Sun by Faulkner or Clay by Joyce, you're like "this is fantastic stuff." Clay is one of my favorite short stories. When Maria leaves out the Balfe verse, I see her as such a real person. In just a short story he makes you feel like you almost know her and everything about her.
Then you try The Bear or Ulysses, and it's like a job. I don't want to work so hard. I understand people say it's a different kind of reward to read Faulkner and Joyce's more ambitious stuff, and that those two are trying to elevate language to a different plane. I just think there's plenty of other fiction I can read, with much less frustration. A calculus textbook is difficult to write, I'm sure. And if you got through all the lessons in a calculus book I'm sure you'd feel a certain reward. It doesn't mean I want to read it.
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I'd like to read some of Flannery O'Connor, being that she is probably the most prolific American Catholic writer of the 20th century. What are the few essential short stories of hers I should start with?
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A Good Man is Hard to Find
Revelation
Good Country People

Most of those can be found full text online.
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"A Good Man is Hard to Find". "Everything That Rises Must Converge", "Revelation", "The Geranium" and "The Artificial ****er"

A Good Man is Hard to Find is her best known work.
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And as for a Catholic point of view... I'm not sure you'll find much common ground. Her view of humanity is pretty damned bleak. It's pretty much summed up by the final lines of her most famous character The Misfit, "she [the grandmother] would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

O'Connor pretty much thinks we all need a someone there to shoot us every minute of our life in order to rescue us from our human condition.
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While I can't respond much to her viewpoint, I do know that she is immensely popular in Catholic circles. For example, the conservative George Weigel's Letters to a Young Catholic devotes a good portion of his first chapter on her and the "Habit of Being."
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Great read. Highly recommended.
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The past two weeks:

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett
Stolen Words by Thomas Mallon
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