Recently my friends and I organized a William Faulkner reading group. We read Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and then The Sound and the Fury (1929). While Sound was published first, Absalom takes place first chronologically, so we read that one first.
Stylistically, the two novels could hardly be more different. Absalom, written in third person, consists almost entirely of long, complex, lyrical sentences (one of them running some seven pages), a prose-poetic text in which Faulkner holds back nothing. He makes no attempt to create realistic dialogue; each character is simply a puppet for his show. Although some have leveled this as a criticism, I actually think it works perfectly fine. I have no commitment to strict realism. Sound, on the other hand, is mostly in first person, and only rarely does Faulkner wax lyrical here. Dialogue is simplified and stream-of-consciousness abounds.