Bibliography
Apr. 14th, 2013 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyTo Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
I am so very, very glad that I read this novel now and that it was not enforced upon me at school. The first time I came across its existence, oddly enough, was in reading a much older friend's GCSE English coursework, where it was the set text, and having no idea of the context - ironically, I suppose I would have been about Scout's age at the time. However, time doesn't hang around for young women to remember books they should read, so it's taken me this long to get around to it. (That and the fact I constantly confuse it with One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, which I also haven't read yet.)
One of the reasons I'm glad I've waited until now to read it is that I have a better understanding of the cultural history behind desegregation and the kind of environment where the Tom Robinson case would have come about. It also means I have a bit of perspective about the criticisms that target this sort of work and its portrayal of African American culture in the 1930s. I also feel that I'm able to appreciate the literary texture a bit more, the way that Scout is quite clearly not speaking as a young child, and thus the interweaving of both childish innocence and more sophisticated reflection and observation. It's really a remarkably compelling book - I could hardly put it down, and read half-way through despite having a cracking headache.
I also like the way the characters gain depth, mainly through Scout seeing conflicting and contradictory things which mean the reader has to piece them together into a character - which, I think, does a nice job of reflecting the fact that human beings are just sometimes strange and odd. I thought this was particularly true of Aunt Alexandra - she starts off as utterly prim and proper, but more and more of her gets revealed from sideways glances as the book goes on, and you start to piece together a rather more complicated picture of her identity and how she is torn over things herself as much as anybody else is. Which, I suppose, is one of the book's underlying messages - humans can sometimes do really bloody dreadful things, even though all logic says that they shouldn't, and part of growing up is deciding how you are going to cope with that contradiction in others and in yourself.
I am so very, very glad that I read this novel now and that it was not enforced upon me at school. The first time I came across its existence, oddly enough, was in reading a much older friend's GCSE English coursework, where it was the set text, and having no idea of the context - ironically, I suppose I would have been about Scout's age at the time. However, time doesn't hang around for young women to remember books they should read, so it's taken me this long to get around to it. (That and the fact I constantly confuse it with One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, which I also haven't read yet.)
One of the reasons I'm glad I've waited until now to read it is that I have a better understanding of the cultural history behind desegregation and the kind of environment where the Tom Robinson case would have come about. It also means I have a bit of perspective about the criticisms that target this sort of work and its portrayal of African American culture in the 1930s. I also feel that I'm able to appreciate the literary texture a bit more, the way that Scout is quite clearly not speaking as a young child, and thus the interweaving of both childish innocence and more sophisticated reflection and observation. It's really a remarkably compelling book - I could hardly put it down, and read half-way through despite having a cracking headache.
I also like the way the characters gain depth, mainly through Scout seeing conflicting and contradictory things which mean the reader has to piece them together into a character - which, I think, does a nice job of reflecting the fact that human beings are just sometimes strange and odd. I thought this was particularly true of Aunt Alexandra - she starts off as utterly prim and proper, but more and more of her gets revealed from sideways glances as the book goes on, and you start to piece together a rather more complicated picture of her identity and how she is torn over things herself as much as anybody else is. Which, I suppose, is one of the book's underlying messages - humans can sometimes do really bloody dreadful things, even though all logic says that they shouldn't, and part of growing up is deciding how you are going to cope with that contradiction in others and in yourself.
