To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee

I read this book for two reasons. At one point I thought I should read it (I read mostly mysteries and don't read much other fiction).  I bought a copy which sat on my shelf looking at me reproachfully because I never read it. Then I saw the Social Justice Theme Read at Resistance is Futile. To Kill a Mockingbird was a featured book and a group read was planned, so I decided this was my opportunity.

I assume most people are familiar with this novel, and I don't need to discuss its literary merits. Nor do I think I am qualified. The novel was published in 1960. As described at Wikipedia:

It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

Here is an overview, from the Amazon.com review:

Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.

Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the heart of her tale; we first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school. She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. At first the circumstances surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's consciousness. Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused, Tom Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in events beyond their understanding.

Not every reader loves To Kill a Mockingbird, but it has been praised by many over the years and hailed as a great novel. I don't remember if I read it in my youth. Or even if I saw the movie. But I knew the basic story before reading it, so there is a good chance that I did one or the other.

I cannot say I enjoyed reading this book. It feels too real, too personal.  I did not grow up in a small town in Southern Alabama in the 1930's. I did grow up in a large city in Alabama in the middle of the state in the 1950's. The experience was close enough, and I don't really like being reminded of it.
 

I read two reviews at Goodreads that mention (in a lot of detail) the reviewers' relationships with their fathers. I think this book does lead one to ponder such things. In some ways, my father was a lot like Atticus. Atticus was a lawyer; my father was a shipping clerk. But they both struggled to support their families. Atticus did not hunt and he did not like guns. My father hunted when he was young and loved guns all his life. But my father was a family man; his primary goal in life was to care for and to provide for his family. We had little money, but my mother did not work outside of the home until I was in college. And he did share Atticus' attitudes about race and equality; he was pro-integration in Alabama's schools when that was a very unpopular attitude in the South. Thus I grew up naively thinking that most people believed in equality for all skin colors, and was shocked to find out differently in my teens.

I think this is a good book, and very beautifully written. It is definitely a book I recommend. Even if a reader does find faults in it, and there are some, it is still worth reading. There is more to this book than just the theme of racial intolerance and injustice. It gives a realistic picture of small town Alabama in the Depression years.

If you are looking for a book on social injustice and the civil rights movement in the southern states, I recommend There Goes My Everything by Jason Sokol. I read that book several years ago and it was also very painful to read. This description is from the dust jacket:

There Goes My Everything traces the origins of the civil rights struggle from World War II, when some black and white American soldiers lived and fought side by side overseas (leading them to question Jim Crow at home), to the beginnings of change in the 1950s and the flared tensions of the 1960s, into the 1970s, when strongholds of white rule suddenly found themselves overtaken by rising black political power. Through it all, Sokol resists the easy categorization of whites caught in the torrent of change; rather, he gives us nuanced portraits of people resisting, embracing, and questioning the social revolution taking place around them.

Various views of To Kill a Mockingbird that I found interesting:

• Review by Roshi Fernando in The Independent.
• 50 Years of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ at The New York Times. Includes links to resources.

I am looking forward to watching the movie soon. I want to compare and contrast, and see how the various players are depicted. And I am looking forward to watching all the extras on the DVD copy that we have had around for a while.