To Kill a Mockingbird

OK, everyone needs to stop what they're doing and go find a copy of Sissy Spacek reading this book. I am not exaggerating when I say it is the best audiobook performance I have ever heard.

I have read To Kill a Mockingbird perhaps 10 or 12 times in my life, and it is one of my favorite books, but this was the first time I listened to it. Sissy was the perfect narrator for Scout, and she also did a fantastic job at all of the other voices. If you like audiobooks, this is a must-listen. (And if any publishers are reading this, please hire Sissy to narrate more Southern literature. Her voice is so soothing she could charm a cat out of a tree.)

What struck me about the story this time is how sadly relevant the issue of racial prejudice and inequality still is, even though the book was first published in 1960. At the heart of the novel is the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man who is accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. What quickly becomes apparent is that Tom is innocent, and Mayella was actually beaten by her father, Bob Ewell, when he caught her trying to kiss a negro.

Atticus Finch, the hero of the novel, does his best to defend Tom, but the jury (and most of the town) convicts him anyway, and Tom is condemned to death. Atticus' two children, Jem and Scout, are deeply upset by the case, especially when Bob Ewell continues to threaten them.

This book reminded me of the police shooting and riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and of innumerable other stories in the news of African-Americans not being treated fairly by officers or the courts. I would like to find hope in what Atticus said when he's trying to explain the Tom Robinson case to Scout: "Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win."

There is so much to love in this book. Scout, whose real name is Jean Louise, is a tomboy and she is our narrator. The story occurs over several years, and we watch her grow up. Harper Lee has a terrific sense of humor, and Scout's antics always make me laugh.

One of Scout's best friends is a boy named Dill (a character reportedly inspired by Harper Lee's real-life friendship with Truman Capote) and at the start of the book, the kids are obsessed with a reclusive neighbor named Boo Radley. Boo is a mystery throughout the story, and when he finally appears, well, I usually have to wipe a few tears from my eyes.

This novel is a gem, a true American classic. It has been a favorite of mine since I first read it in 8th-grade English, and I think it has had an impact on every generation who reads it. And based on the news, it sounds like it is still needed.

Favorite Quotes
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”

“As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it — whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.”

“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”

این کتاب تو یک سال گذشته هر زمان که تو کتابفروشی بودم بهم چشمک میزد که بخرمش :)) و خب باید بگم فوق العاده بود، و مدت‌ها بود که به معنای واقعی اینقدر از خوندن یک داستان بلند لذت نبرده بودم! داستان شهر کوچیکی تو سال‌های دهه ۳۰ آمریکا که از زبان یک دختربچه روایت میشه و بی‌نهایت شیرینه. کشتن مرغ مینا درباره‌ی اجرای عدالته، تلاش برای خوب بودن و خوب زندگی کردن.. «اتیکوس فینچ» نمونه‌ی یه مرد درستکار و صادقه که شبیهش خیلی کم پیدا میشه، و اونقدر خوب و مهربون و دوست داشتنیه که شخصیتش به راحتی از ذهن بیرون نمیره و برای من یکی از موندگارترین‌ها شد.
بخش توصیف دادگاه پرداختش بی‌نهایت محشر بود، جوری که نمیشد لحظه‌ای کتاب رو زمین بذاری، همون قدر پر از استرس، سخت و تاثیرگذار..
همه چیز این داستان به اندازه و کافیه، جذاب و پر کششه و به حدی زیبا از عدالت، صداقت، خوبی، بدی و روابط انسان‌ها حرف میزنه که لذت خوندنش تا مدت‌ها همراهتونه..

After watching Friends Reunion, I felt like going back my high school times to revisit my reading list and picked up my one of the all time favorite reads!

I am rereading this book at different timelines of my life and I always find something different to like, getting attracted by different details, changing my mind about which character is my favorite. Nope actually last thing is a total lie. I love Jean Louise Scout Finch. Her narration, her growing up, her innocent and curious mind made her reserve a special place on my heart. She’s the daughter of charismatic, righteous Atticus Finch who is one of the remarkable characters in the literature history, a prominent lawyer defending black man who is accused of raping a white woman which results with townies’ growing hatred against the entire family.

It’s a bold, well developed story takes place in Monroeville, Alabama on 1936! A quiet fascinating lesson of civics, lesson of history and lesson of ethics.

My fifth time reading goes smoothly and reminding me of how much I loved the story of small town, a country, townies, neighbors, brave criticism of racism.

If you prefer audibook option, Sissy Spacek did a hell of a great job!

Here are my favorite quotes :
“Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open”

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for."

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

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2010 F.A.B. Bookclub pick # I.❤️. F.A.B.

I think this is the 3rd time I’ve read it. How do you even begin to rate a book like this? It’s a classic.

Note: this book is listed as one of the most popular books to be banned, over the past decade, from both schools and private libraries. Support freedom of expression by reading and buying banned books! ❤️

To know this book is to love it. There are many reasons why Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most beloved novels ever written. In setting forth the story of what happens when a lawyer in early-20th-century Alabama defends an African American man who has been unjustly accused of a horrible crime, Harper Lee writes with a grace and musicality characteristic of Southern literature. She delineates the Alabama society of an earlier time with an unerring eye and ear for detail. She tells a great and moving story of moral courage under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. And she composes a heartfelt paean for a beloved father.

When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, it was not such an easy thing for a white Southern author to write an openly and unapologetically anti-racist novel. In Lee’s home state of Alabama alone, Rosa Parks’s courageous act of civil disobedience, and the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr., were just a couple of years in the past; and still in Alabama’s near future were the jailing of Dr. King in Birmingham, the violence at Selma, and George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door” at Tuscaloosa to try to keep the University of Alabama segregated. It is against that backdrop of social tension that a young Alabama woman crafted her novel – one that won the Pulitzer Prize and became an instant classic.

The graceful, understated style of the novel no doubt contributed to its success. As the novel’s narrator, a grown woman named Jean Louise Finch, looks back to her childhood as the tomboyish “Scout” in her hometown of Maycomb, she recalls her beloved family – her widowed father Atticus Finch, a highly regarded lawyer, and her older brother Jem – and the language in which she offers those recollections at once makes the reader want to travel along.

Part of the beauty of To Kill a Mockingbird, even before the novel gets to its main business of chronicling the trial of Tom Robinson, is getting a sense of how family life might proceed in a small Southern town back in the 1930’s. For instance, Scout, Jem, and their friend Dill who visits them every summer have an ongoing fascination with the nearby Radley family, whose son Boo, a young man with an unspecified disability, has become a subject of interest for the children. There are all sorts of troubling, vaguely Gothic stories about Boo’s alleged behavior, and the children tend to linger about the Radley house, hoping for a glimpse of the mysterious Boo.

The children’s unauthorized visits to the Radley house eventually cause Atticus to intervene. Atticus, using courtroom tactics that will be important later in the novel, and keeping his mouth “suspiciously firm, as if he were trying to hold it in line”, gets Jem to admit that the three children were “putting [Boo Radley’s] life’s history on display for the edification of the neighborhood” (p. 50). Shortly afterwards, Jem “realized that he had been done in by the oldest lawyer’s trick on record. He waited a respectful distance from the front steps, watched Atticus leave the house and walk toward town. When Atticus was out of earshot Jem yelled after him: ‘I thought I wanted to be a lawyer but I ain’t so sure now!” (p. 50)

Many people first experience To Kill a Mockingbird through Alan J. Pakula’s brilliant 1962 film adaptation, with Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch. It is a great film; and if you love it, as I do, I hope that you will return to it, and will continue to draw enjoyment from it. At the same time, I hope you will turn to the novel, as Lee has time in the novel to go into greater depth regarding the characters and themes that she wants to explore.

One of my favorite passages in the novel, for example, deals with Mrs. Dubose, a cantankerous old woman of the town whose continuing dedication to the prejudices of the Old South is symbolized by the Confederate Army pistol that she keeps under her shawls. In Chapter 11, Mrs. Dubose harshly criticizes Atticus for deciding to defend Tom Robinson, and Jem retaliates by tearing up Mrs. Dubose’s prize camellias. Jem’s punishment, his “sentence,” is to go and read to Mrs. Dubose, every day but Sundays, for a month.

In the context of Jem’s “sentence,” Atticus shares some of his ideas, in a way that will remind many of us of when our fathers told us something that expanded our ethical awareness. Atticus explains to Scout that he is defending Tom Robinson, despite the strong disapproval of most whites in his community, because “before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience” (p. 99). He dismisses Mrs. Dubose’s race-based insults by saying that “it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you” (p. 102).

And when Mrs. Dubose has died, and new information has been revealed regarding her final illness, Atticus tells Jem that “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what” (p. 105). Those themes will be of major significance throughout To Kill a Mockingbird.

Indeed, as Atticus takes up the defense of Tom Robinson, an African-American man who has been falsely accused of rape by the daughter of a white farmer, we see a practical application of the ideas Atticus has expressed regarding the importance of doing the right thing, even if one knows that one cannot prevail. This element of To Kill a Mockingbird comes forth just before the beginning of the trial, when Scout hears a group of Maycomb whites speaking disparagingly of her father’s work as defense attorney for Tom Robinson. One man points out that Atticus was court-appointed as Tom Robinson’s defense attorney, and another replies, “Yeah, but Atticus aims to defend him. That’s what I don’t like about it.” The grown-up Scout as narrator recalls her childhood confusion at hearing these words:

This was news, news that put a different light on things: Atticus had to, whether he wanted to or not. I thought it odd that he hadn’t said anything to us about it – we could have used it many times in defending him and ourselves. He had to, that’s why he was doing it, equaled fewer fights and less fussing. But did that explain the town’s attitude? The court appointed Atticus to defend him. Atticus aimed to defend him. That’s what they didn’t like about it. It was confusing. (p. 151)

Once the trial has commenced, Atticus swiftly exposes the inconsistencies and lies in the testimony of Tom Robinson’s accuser, Mayella Ewell, and her father, Bob (“Robert E. Lee”) Ewell – ruining, in the process, whatever shreds of credibility these two people from an impoverished farm family may ever have had in Maycomb County. But the jury renders an unjust verdict nonetheless; and when Jem wants to know why, Atticus offers the following:

“So far, nothing in your life has interfered with your reasoning process. Those are twelve reasonable men in everyday life, Tom’s jury, but you saw something come between them and reason….There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads – they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins….The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.” (pp. 201-02)

But there is still a good deal of unfinished business left in To Kill a Mockingbird. Bob Ewell – exposed as an abusive liar, his credibility in his community thoroughly and permanently ruined in that courtroom – wants revenge against Atticus, and plans to seek that revenge by moving against Scout and Jem. The dramatic resolution of those plot events causes Scout to reflect, after a last-minute rescue by an unexpected benefactor, that “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them” (pp. 253-54).

To Kill a Mockingbird is so complete in terms of plot, characterization, setting, point of view, and theme that a single question often comes up: Why was this novel the only one? Harper Lee was 34 years old when To Kill a Mockingbird was published, and she lived another 55 years after that – and no other novel of hers appeared until Go Set a Watchman, an early draft of Mockingbird, was published in 2015, when Lee was 89 and in failing health. Why did the writer who once said that she wanted to be “the Jane Austen of South Alabama” not continue with her literary career?

Here is my theory. Go Set a Watchman sets forth a significantly less favorable picture of Atticus Finch. The character of Atticus in turn is clearly drawn from Lee’s beloved father Amasa C. Lee – who, like the novel’s Atticus, mounted an unsuccessful legal defense in a racially charged case in 1930’s Alabama. In the process of revising Go Set a Watchman into To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee found a way to recast the fictionalized portrait of her father in a more favorable light; but perhaps she found that there would be no way to move forward with her novelistic career without drawing realistic and damning portraits of real-life people who would read her work and resent the way they had been portrayed.

Thomas Wolfe, another great Southern writer of the 20th century, faced the same kind of resentment, and accepted that the way he had depicted fellow Asheville residents in novels like Look Homeward, Angel (1929) meant that he could not go home again to Western North Carolina. Perhaps Harper Lee decided that she could not, fictively speaking, go to the places where she would have to go if she were to write more novels.

Yet criticizing the author of a great novel because she “only” wrote one great novel seems ungracious in the extreme. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee set forth an unforgettably vivid portrait of American life in a small Southern town in the 1930’s. She created in Atticus Finch a singular example of a character of individual courage and conscience – a man who fights an unwinnable battle against a society’s corruption, simply because it is the right and human thing to do. This book is also a moving, lyrical love song for a beloved father – one that will cause many of us to recall with gratitude the strength, courage, and compassion of our own fathers. Harper Lee’s Mockingbird lives on, and no one can ever kill it.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

This is a novel that I have read countless times over the years and it never fails to connect with me on some level with every reading. That is no small feat for a book to accomplish. To speak to people the world over, for over 50 years, means that there is something universal in this text.
We are all the mockingbirds of the title, and anyone who has reached the age of majority knows the feelings that the loss of innocence, and the harsh light of reality can create in a person. Harper Lee wrote a novel that captured the essence of that most universal of experiences, and I for one am moved by it every time.
I won't rehash plot points, but I will give you some reasons why you should read, and then reread, this text.
The first reason is for the beautiful depiction of imaginative childhood. The narrator, her brother Jem, and their friend Dill embody most of the traits of childhood, and their creative games, and thought processes are a joy to behold. The voice of Scout (the narrator) is a pitch perfect recreation of childhood and childish impulses. Part I (chapters 1-11) of this book are possibly the best recreation of childhood that I have come across in literature.
Another reason is a pretty simple one actually. The character of Atticus Finch is one of the noblest literary creations ever written. I want to be like him, and there are not many characters in literature I can, or would, say that about. The fact that being like Atticus is possible makes him even more endearing to me. He is someone who is noble in every sense of the word, and serves as an inspiration for so many reasons. He is a good father, a decent and empathetic man, and a person who tries to see the good in almost anything. The fact that there are so few Atticus Finches in real life makes him seem all the more desirable to me. It is obvious as you read this text that Ms. Lee loves this character. Atticus’ emphatic desire to see all people as humans and worthy of respect (even when those people are undesirable) is a lesson for our (and all) time. It is a trait that many people preach, but few actually practice. Let someone vote for someone you do not like, or have a leader you can’t stand, and then watch the ugly flow forth. Atticus resists those impulses at every turn in this novel, and I am inspired by that.
There are numerous other reasons why this is a stellar work of genius, not least of which is the wonderful plotting of the novel, the excellent and fleshed out supporting characters (these people are real to me) and the message that Lee finds numerous ways to reiterate throughout the book.
When you get to the beautiful and brilliant chapter 9, the thematic heart of the novel begins to unfold. And every time I visit Maycomb County I find myself tearing up a little at such beautifully human moments. The text’s final chapter never fails to move me emotionally because it is so understated and powerful.
Ms. Lee has created a pastoral version of the Depression era south, and even though there is vicious bigotry and hatred depicted in the novel, Ms. Lee (through her characters) does not give up on them, or us. The world, and we, can be better. We just need to remind ourselves to walk in other people's shoes once in a while.

˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗ 5

To Kill a Mockingbird has become such a potent cultural symbol in the Western world, especially in the United States, that you risk being seen as an insensitive cynic or a heartless bastard if you sound a dissenting note. From a moral standpoint it attacks institutionalised racism against the black people in the United States back in the day when it was common to treat them as subhumans. This is a noble goal, but judged on criteria of literary merit, I contend that there's not much in the book.

Flannery O'Connor called it a "children's novel." She did not intend it as a compliment. The novel suffers from a saccharine dose of sentiment, and it is fair to label it as a black-and-white cliché, literally. I found the characters two-dimensional, singly pursuing their idea without meaningful conflict that could have lent them some humanity. Atticus Finch, a morally upright man and gentle father, is the author's moralising mouthpiece who, supine and misty in the early stages of the story, is catapulted into action when he takes upon himself to defend the black man. If there's more to Atticus, I'm sure to have missed it completely. There is an oft-quoted famous line that goes like this:

n  You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.n

A bit of Captain Obvious wouldn't you say? It would have been illuminating if Ms Lee could make the reader climb inside the skin for a walk.

You can split the book into two separate novellas, neatly, like a cake; so big is the disconnect between the first half which reads like an interesting ghost story and the second half which is no more than a reportage on the proceedings of a criminal case in a court of law where a black man is facing (false) charges of rape. Through these court proceedings Ms Lee tries to paint a dismal picture of the times when hapless black people didn't stand a chance once a white man accused them of wrongdoing.

If one is to judge a work of fiction, one is to judge it for the style of its narrative method and what the writer has attempted to do in it; but there's a common fallacy, as I'd call it, of judging art's worth based entirely on the subjective moral urgency of its social content. This is not to say that I do not understand the need to incorporate minority voices that had been suppressed into mute existence for many centuries (But this story, unlike Toni Morrison's novels, is written from the white man's perspective). Quite a few famous post-colonial novels fall in this category: thin on literary craft but still appreciated for their social or political import. So I can understand why an average novel like this one spoke so strongly to the changing zeitgeist and struck a chord with millions of readers.

December 2014