She asked Berke Breathed to keep Opus around. He brought back Opus for 2 other strips, Outland and Opus.
Maybe I will now read to kill a mockingbird since I have so much free time now.
Do read it. It’s the greatest work in all of American literature.
It really is a really good book and Chronos might be right. I’m hard pressed trying to think of a better book by an American Author.
Yes, get the book. I agree with Chronos.
When my son was in high school they read it in class. On one sunny day we talked about it under the apple tree.
But the movie with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, and Mary Badham as Scout, was great too. They fit together so well that Mary Badham called Gregory Peck, Atticus for the rest of his life.
ordered a used copy of the book. I will watch the movie after I read it.
TKAM was one of only two assigned reading books I had in high school that I ended up liking, well, loving actually.I was sure it was going to be awful, but if I had to reduce my library to, say, ten books, that one would be in it.
I’ve never seen the movie. But the book is deeply effecting.
It came along at such a time that it’s not too much to say it changed my life.
I’ve never read the book. Does it have the same effect on adult readers?
It is a very good book, a classic, but I can’t say that it changed my life. The film is also excellent.
Agreed! I say that all the time, it’s an excellent read.
There is Hemingway, Steinbeck, Samuel Clemens, William Faulkner…
The book and the movie are very close. The plot is not changed, just some things condensed out ot it. The movie deserved it’s awards. It had Robert Duvall’s first screen appearance. He was important, but had no lines.
You might be able to make a case for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being greater. The rest of those? No.
I’d put The Grapes of Wrath or *To Have and Have Not *up against To Kill a Mockingbird.
I found that Faulkner and Steinbeck were great cures for insomnia.
Huck and Moby-Dick
(Ahem)
Huck and Moby-Dick are certainly greater. And I second cp’s elevation of The Grapes of Wrath.
John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is a better novel. Ditto Ann Petry’s The Street and Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.
Also Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Frank Norris’s McTeague, Henry James’s The Aspen Papers, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
And Richard Wright’s Native Son. And e.e. cummings’s The Enormous Room.. And Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. And Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. And Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.
Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Milt Gross’s He Done Her Wrong. Patrick Dennis’s Little Me.
I can think of more.
I see you’ve already posted in this thread, which seems like a more appropriate place for such a list.
I think that at least some of the books that you mentioned are good in ways that make them more challenging and less accessible than To Kill A Mockingbird. The ways that TKaM are good are ways that contribute to its broad appeal.