As I Lay Dying

Before I read this book I had heard a lot about the infamous William Faulkner. Considered to be a quintessential Modernist, Faulkner can sometimes be a bit hard to digest. This book, like several of his others, is written in stream-of-consciousness.
At first, I found the story a bit hard to follow. It is told through the words of several different narrators, seventeen or so as I recall, with every chapter switching from to another. Instead of revealing the plot or characters in a typical, straightforward way, Faulkner gives you bits and pieces through each of their distinct voices.
The story centers around the Bundren family and their journey to bury their dead mother in the place that she had requested. Hence the 'As I Lay Dying' refers to her.
The longstanding problems of the Bundren family are revealed as the family journeys across the Mississippi countryside. The reader comes to like some of the family members and really despise some of the less honorable ones, particularly the father, who step-by-step unveils how selfish he really is.
The voices range from the main family's nosy, self-righteous neighbor to the mother's youngest son who cannot understand that she is really physically gone. In fact, it is his words that comprise the book's most famous chapter: "My mother is a fish."
I would be lying if I said I understood everything in this book, but from what I got, I did like it quite a bit. One thing that helped me was looking at some plot summaries online. This really helps when trying to make sense of the fragmented plot.
I also studied this book with a very good professor at my school. He made the interesting observation that As I Lay Dying is realistic in the sense that it is told in bits and pieces, with time jumping around and the reader never really sure who is telling the truth. Readers have come to expect authors to tell them how things are and how they, as the reader, should feel about the events happening in the book. Faulkner doesn't do this. Instead he presents pieces of the family's life and inner thoughts and lets the reader decide what he or she thinks. This is similar to real life--we hear bits and pieces of conversations all around us, and most of these have their own personal spins and biases. We then take these things in and put our own spin on them and decide what we think.
That Faulkner was able to do this and still produce a meaningful, humorous book is what amazes me. It seems to have impressed a lot of other people as well, as this book is often considered one his finest and often makes lists of the best American novels.
Faulkner can be a little difficult and I think you have to be in the right mood to read it and enjoy it. But when you are, he has a unique way of storytelling that is worth looking into.