I finished William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” last week, but due to a bout of sickness and the mind-exhausting nature of the book, I held off on making the usual post-book post.

This is the second of Faulkner’s books that I have read, after taking down “The Sound and The Fury” last year. After reading that book, I did some additional reading about the story and the author. I remember seeing somewhere that it was considered one of the most difficult books to read.

For some reason, I hadn’t considered that his other writings would be incredibly taxing to get through. While “The Sound and The Fury” had three different narrators — including one who was mentally handicapped and lacked a concept of time — and a male and female character with the same name, “Absalom, Absalom!” has multiple narrators who sometimes tell parts of each other’s lives.

It’s the kind of book where you read five pages and realize you haven’t the slightest clue what just happened. Fortunately, one of the narrators is just as confused while he is being told the story, and halfway through the book makes sure everyone is clear.

The most difficult part of Faulkner’s style is that he writes in a stream of consciousness that creates incredibly complex sentences. He’s probably the only writer I have ever seen use two colons in the same sentence.

I started typing out an example and realized the sentence literally took up an entire page. The punctuation sums it up pretty well: six dashes, 12 commas, two sets of parentheses and a semicolon. It also includes the phrase, “lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation…”

There’s a reason it took me a month to read the book. That’s not to say, though, that I didn’t enjoy it. The story is solid, one that has one of those moments 200 pages in that makes you glad you slogged through everything that came before.

Plus, Faulkner used one of my favorite words — verisimilitude — and described a guy wearing an overcoat over a bathrobe as looking “huge and shapeless like a disheveled bear.” I defy you to picture a disheveled bear and not be entertained.

If the title of the post put that song in your head and you want to indulge, here it is. The group is notable for having a singer that once prompted a former roommate to ask if the phrase “belly tap” should be hyphenated. I think we decided it should, though I’m not sure we came up with a clear definition of the term.

Probably for the best.