What a shame that Harper Lee only published two books. Her writing is just perfection. She has an amazing blend of beauty, humour, reality, harshness, innocence and darkness which she balances perfectly. Harper is also very skilled in saying a lot, with minimal words. Whilst reading this book I took notice of how every word in the book is vital, she does not waste any words on unnecessary dialogue, descriptions or filler. This book follows on from To Kill a Mockingbird, with the same […]
Two Dystopia, South America, a dog, and the South walk across a bridge
Brave New World – 4/5 Stars Another book I read in high school and college, but hadn’t re-read for 15 or so years. I was thinking about using this for a unit on dystopian literature in my English 12 Special Ed classes, but for a few reasons and a few conversations I don’t really want to have with students, I don’t think I will after all. For one, the sexuality in the book is a lot more forward than I originally remembered, and includes some […]
We’re all flawed
It’s impossible to write a review of Harper Lee’s ”Go set a watchman” without comparing it to her masterpiece ”To kill a mockingbird”. My comparison is short: The former not even close to the latter. ”To kill a mockingbird” is a classic for a reason. That’s not to say that ”Go set a watchman” is a bad book; it has many redeeming features. But more on that later. Jean Louise (aka Scout) Finch, one of the central characters of TKAM, is now an adult. She […]
Clueless
I had a lot of good reasons for not wanting to read this book. Even before all the pearl-clutching reviews came out bemoaning the racism of a beloved character, before the stories that pointed out how we’ve always misunderstood the race component of To Kill a Mockingbird [TKAM] anyway, I suspected that a sequel to a classic novel was bound to disappoint. And the strange circumstances of its publication, after decades of the author and her sister saying it never would be, further dampened any […]
An important, painful book
When I was a child, two of the most influential people in my life were my grandparents. I loved them with every fiber of my being. They were a stable rock in my unsteady and turbulent adolescent life. They provided me with the idea of the kind, loving Christian home I wanted for myself. One might even say I idolized them a bit. My grandma died ten years ago, and in the three weeks before her death, I found out a family truth that shattered […]
An interesting look at the seed behind To Kill a Mockingbird that tries to blend memoir, a love story and the political history of the south into one novel that doesn’t quite mesh together.
It’s not often you get to peek inside the publishing industry and read a manuscript before major overhauling. The original scroll for On The Road, for example, is more rambling, explicit and lacking in punctuation than it’s fully published counterpart – but follows much of the same beats (no pun intended.) Go Set A Watchman is a whole other beast. The story is now a familiar one to anyone who has glimpsed at a newspaper in the last few months; a manuscript delivered in the […]