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Review: To Kill a Mockingbird
Jan. 4th, 2020 08:55 pmI just finished To Kill a Mockingbird. I feared it was one of those deeply disturbing stories about some horrific event, and it is, but that is only one small part of it.
The whole first half is just a story about life in small-town Alabama in 1935 for a lawyer's daughter and her brother, and it's mostly quite fun. You have a bit of an unreliable narrator. (Though whenever you do understand something she doesn't, it often feels a little bit creepy.) The little kids have hilariously huge vocabularies. They have adventures. The town is full of characters, some good, some evil, some both, some just mysterious.
Part II is mostly about an exciting trial (the book was written when Perry Mason was a popular TV show). Then there is a tying up of loose ends, which at first I found to detract from the book, but then they got to one of the loose ends I had been wondering about, plus another one I had managed to forget about.
This doesn't count toward my quest to read books set in other countries, but this culture felt quite alien to me. Even though one review quoted in the book said "I think perhaps the great appeal of the novel is that it reminds readers everywhere of a person or a town they have known." The most surprising thing to me was how shocked and horrified the population was about a black man claiming to pity a white woman. Like obviously black people are so inferior that it is impossible one could pity a white person. There were also several levels of poverty. And all kinds of alien-to-me social traditions.
One lesson is that grownups can become irrational on certain issues due to cultural influences. It makes me wonder what kind of irrational beliefs I hold in order to maintain my self-worth or world view. I mean, do I really magically have none? Another lesson is that people can be horrible, they can be amazing, and these traits can be, and maybe even usually are, within the same person. The book addresses many other issues including mob behavior, jury behavior, schools, self-defense, whether to fight losing battles, collection plates, the right to privacy, and even the opioid crisis.
The book also has all different kinds of advice, some of which I might have liked to have read about when I was a kid. (I got called names, but it was so much less mean-spirited than the stuff in this book. With my current personality, if someone called me a "shrimp," I'd just bend my knees and continue walking as a shorter person.)
I did cry a few times, but it was usually happy crying.
Here is a taste of the writing style, which I consider to be read-aloud quality:
Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn't supposed to be doing things that required pants. ... furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father's lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I had been born good but had grown progressively worse every year. She hurt my feelings and set my teeth permanently on edge, but when I asked Atticus [Dad] about it, he said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go on about my business...
Here is a sentence about one of the very interesting characters:
"I had never encountered a being who had deliberately perpetrated fraud against himself." And he's not crazy. You have to read most of the book to find out why, but I recommend it.
This was published sixty years ago and seems a little dated. Sadly, it is also still very relevant. I really do think the racism isn't as bad as it once was. But the whole irrational adult thing is still going on strong with issues like climate change.
P.S. I forgot to say where the title came from. When the children get guns for Christmas, their father tells them he hopes they will just shoot at cans, but if they insist on shooting at birds, they can aim for blue jays, but it's a sin to kill a mockingbird because they never do anything to hurt us. They don't eat our food, their nests aren't destructive, they just make music for us. This is related to a whole larger philosophy that you shouldn't kick someone when they're down (and that includes all black Americans in the 1930s).
The whole first half is just a story about life in small-town Alabama in 1935 for a lawyer's daughter and her brother, and it's mostly quite fun. You have a bit of an unreliable narrator. (Though whenever you do understand something she doesn't, it often feels a little bit creepy.) The little kids have hilariously huge vocabularies. They have adventures. The town is full of characters, some good, some evil, some both, some just mysterious.
Part II is mostly about an exciting trial (the book was written when Perry Mason was a popular TV show). Then there is a tying up of loose ends, which at first I found to detract from the book, but then they got to one of the loose ends I had been wondering about, plus another one I had managed to forget about.
This doesn't count toward my quest to read books set in other countries, but this culture felt quite alien to me. Even though one review quoted in the book said "I think perhaps the great appeal of the novel is that it reminds readers everywhere of a person or a town they have known." The most surprising thing to me was how shocked and horrified the population was about a black man claiming to pity a white woman. Like obviously black people are so inferior that it is impossible one could pity a white person. There were also several levels of poverty. And all kinds of alien-to-me social traditions.
One lesson is that grownups can become irrational on certain issues due to cultural influences. It makes me wonder what kind of irrational beliefs I hold in order to maintain my self-worth or world view. I mean, do I really magically have none? Another lesson is that people can be horrible, they can be amazing, and these traits can be, and maybe even usually are, within the same person. The book addresses many other issues including mob behavior, jury behavior, schools, self-defense, whether to fight losing battles, collection plates, the right to privacy, and even the opioid crisis.
The book also has all different kinds of advice, some of which I might have liked to have read about when I was a kid. (I got called names, but it was so much less mean-spirited than the stuff in this book. With my current personality, if someone called me a "shrimp," I'd just bend my knees and continue walking as a shorter person.)
I did cry a few times, but it was usually happy crying.
Here is a taste of the writing style, which I consider to be read-aloud quality:
Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn't supposed to be doing things that required pants. ... furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father's lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I had been born good but had grown progressively worse every year. She hurt my feelings and set my teeth permanently on edge, but when I asked Atticus [Dad] about it, he said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go on about my business...
Here is a sentence about one of the very interesting characters:
"I had never encountered a being who had deliberately perpetrated fraud against himself." And he's not crazy. You have to read most of the book to find out why, but I recommend it.
This was published sixty years ago and seems a little dated. Sadly, it is also still very relevant. I really do think the racism isn't as bad as it once was. But the whole irrational adult thing is still going on strong with issues like climate change.
P.S. I forgot to say where the title came from. When the children get guns for Christmas, their father tells them he hopes they will just shoot at cans, but if they insist on shooting at birds, they can aim for blue jays, but it's a sin to kill a mockingbird because they never do anything to hurt us. They don't eat our food, their nests aren't destructive, they just make music for us. This is related to a whole larger philosophy that you shouldn't kick someone when they're down (and that includes all black Americans in the 1930s).