Wise Blood

This morning I finished reading "Wise Blood" by Flannery O'Connor. It wasn't really long enough at 120 pages to be a book; more like a novella. I have read a lot of her short stories, but none of her books, and while talking with Jenn at the reference desk last Friday, she got me thinking about O'Connor and I decided to read some of her longer stories. This one was about a young man named Hazel who seems to deliberately make life harder for himself than it needs to be. It was full of shady characters, like his landlady who only wants to marry him for his government pension, and a zoo guard who seems creepy and evasive. O'Connor was influenced by Faulkner, and it shows. Reading O'Connor, like reading Faulkner, is like looking at an iceberg: you only see the tip and you have to figure out the rest. I liked it, and am looking forward to reading the rest of her work.