How well Light in August holds up over time - and how it doesn't

With libraries in lockdown, or at least they should be, sadly, I've turned back to my own library, which is pretty substantial and a physical replication of all of the learning of my entire life. Many of my most treasured, and frequently returned-to, books are some from my teenage years, when I first became interested in literature, an interest, passion, vocation that has guided and sustained me throughout my life. I thought it might be time to turn back to some books that I at one time loved but that I've not read or re-considered for 20+ years; some I can only faintly remember and couldn't possibly provide you off the cuff with a plot summary. How well do they hold up? Have they changed? Have I? Has the world? I started out yesterday reading for the 1st time in probably 35 years Faulkner's Light in August, and am pleased to say that from the outset this is still a terrific novel, by most standards: Vivid and fully delineated characters, an engaging plot, a brilliant re-creation of life in a time and place and among a social class not often depicted in literary works, moving, and often funny. The plot involves a pregnant teenager (Lena) who's left her home in Alabama and walked to Mississippi in search of the baby's father, who of course has abandoned her and whom she'll never find; she encounters in Jefferson, Miss., the territorial center of all of WF's novels, a worker (Byron Bunch) in a lumber mill, a man of fastidious habits and deep religious conviction, who falls in love with her. Strange secondary characters loom on the periphery, notably Joe Christmas, who works in the mill and has a side business selling bootleg whiskey, and Hightower, a minister who has been stripped of his title and lives in near isolation. All of this holds up well - even better than I remembered, in fact, as the novel is less "difficult" than it was on first encounter, in part because contemporary fiction can more commodiously handle complex, multi-layered plots: Falkner invented many devices (particularly use of stream-of-consciousness) that today fall on familiar ground. (WF's next novel, Absolum, Absolum!, carried his mannerisms to an extreme and I found, when I tried it about 10 years ago, that it was practically unreadable.) Where LiA doesn't hold up so well is in WF's portrayal of race relations; it's to his credit that he has many powerful black figures in his work, but there seems to be an overall general assumption that accommodates to the racial attitudes of his time and place: the black characters speak in exaggerated dialect and there's a sense that the blacks are willfully less educated - with no real recognition of the barriers and even laws that kept black people "in their place" in that day and age and region. I'll keep an eye on that going forward.