I do not like To Kill A Mockingbird.

Yeah, it was allright the first two times I was forced to read it for school. I don’t get it. What and where is the cosmic greatness that’s supposed to be inherent in this novel?

I can’t comment on its cosmic greatness but I love the book.

It makes some valid points and manages to do so with wit and style. Maybe that’s why, in a cosmic sense, it’s great.

I have no problem with the movie or book, seeing as I’ve read and seen neither, but I understand the weird difference between reality and what is essentially hype. A book may well be wonderful, a film may be brilliant, but if one’s own situation (eg student) means one’s exposed to far more of this praise than is strictly balanced, strange things happen to the Expectancy gland. I guess the trick is to learn never to listen to anyone to the point of abandoning your own judgement, and even then, always allow first impressions to fade if they weren’t positive. With Citizen Kane I quickly realised that there was probably something I was missing, and I managed to try and watch it from the POV of a moviegoer at the time. With Star Wars we may yet have to learn to teach later generations to do the same thing. None of these movies is deserving of the sheer tonnage of praise heaped on it, but that’s because there are so many people doing the heaping: with globalisation the way it is today, a film might have more fans than some religions have attracted. Any individual enthusiasm, however, is more than justified.

Is any of this making sense? I’ve lost track.

Sorry to keep on, but I wanted to add that it’s always worth remembering something may get praise for what it represents, rather than the actual performances or story therein. Thus Philadelphia - in my opinion not a bad little film, but probably decades behind the independent movies - was representative of The Establishment accepting AIDS’ reality. By the way, anyone with enough money to hire Tom Hanks gets to represent The Establishment these days. He recently helped The Establishment acknowledge the existence of e-mail and desert islands, too. What a guy.

It all makes me think of Princess Diana’s death. I don’t know about the rest of the world but Britain just collapsed for a couple of weeks. That was one of the strangest experiences of my life. People were weeping in the streets; the lot. If you’d asked what was so special about her, few people could have told you, because as relatively innocent and abused as she may have been, the grief was not all for her. It was something else, like when you start crying because you’re cross about burning the dinner, but find you can’t stop for hours, because something else has been building up inside you, something so old it’s lost its name. Inevitably, though, it is Diana who is remembered as the catalyst. That’s why she’s so iconic now.

ps: maybe it’s just a really good book. Maybe the reviewers fancied Gregory Peck…

My all time favorite book (which doesn’t mean you should like it, or be made to read it twice. What’s with that anyway, like there isn’t enough literature out there?)

I like the way Harper Lee captures Scout coming of age.

I like the poetic language she uses (I can’t find any of my copies right now, but early - in the first three pages - she talks of ladies and talcum powder and the heat. Its such a wonderful passage, I can’t believe it isn’t coming to me right now).

I like the juxtoposition between violence and the completely ordinary.

I like that Harper Lee’s next door neighbor growing up was Truman Capote, giving a whole new meaning to Dill.

I think Harper Lee managed to beautifully write a pretty original story with several important messages that was still accessible to most people and has managed to hold up over time. That, in my opinion, is its greatness.

I got it in an all-white rural grade school that was taking it upon itself to mend the entire country’s racial divide by means of To Kill A Mockingbird.

And last week I read a newspaper column that advocated the same thing.

How do you feel about Tequila Mockingbird, then?:wink:

to kill a mockimgbird is one of the truly great books.
it shows the country as it was, when the inequality was “just the way it is”
and when you come to realize that the way it is is not the way it should be.
and alot of the time it happens when we are not really old enough to understand.
it may not be the greatest book ever written, but it is one that does have something to say and it is well worh reading.

I read it for school and thought it was LAME. I didn’t like it at ALL. I remember being very disappointed because I’ll read just about anything… but that book was sheer agony to read. That and The Scarlet Letter…gah.

Heh, heh, I just got that…

Anywho, I didn’t like the book (nor the movie) was I was forced to read it in ninth grade, but as I look back on it now I seem to remember it being good, I was just opposed to the idea of forced reading.

Disliked the movie ( too much focus on Gregory peck, good as he is, and the child actors didn’t do justice to the characters in the book ). I loved the book. In fact I have very few favorite anythings, but that might just be my favorite book. And I was indeed introduced to it in the ninth grade and fell in love with it. Now Paradise lost on the other hand, was painful. And I’ve never really enjoyed a single thing by Jane Austen or the sisters Bronte. Oh and Jude the Obscure - Worst book ( and most depressing film ) ever!

OpalCat: And strangely enough, though I love To Kill a Mockingbird, I had much the same reaction as you did to The Scarlet Letter - Insufferably boring. This despite the fact that that particular book has been called the “greatest American novel” and Hawthorne “our greatest novelist”. Feh. Give me Mark Twain, any day.

  • Tamerlane

Of course, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. There is nothing more annoying than not caring for a particular book, and having a dozen people roll their eyes at you and call you a philistine.

However, since you asked, I will tell you why I liked it:

I think Lee does an amazing job of capturing how the world seems when you are a child. Scout is both naive and insightful. She takes many aspects of her life for granted, and as the events unfold, the reader sees Scout process this information, and reach new understandings about the way the world works.

The humorous small Southern town stuff – this is a genre sort of thing that most people either like or hate. I like it, and I think Lee executes well (for what it is). I think the minor characters (the dippy school teacher, the neighbors, the town reporter, the annoying cousin) are both funny and realistic.

The humor in general – I find this book very funny. When Scout has to be a ham in the school play. When they make the morphodite snowman. Even the dark humor, when the Klan buys their sheets from the Jewish shop owner, strikes me as very sly.

Lee’s ability to string together a bunch of episodes and have them all be related – this impresses me a lot. The morphine lady, the rabid dog, going to the colored church, the whole trial, Boo Radley. I feel like I often read books that attempt to do this, but don’t do it well. Lee presents these episodes without hitting the reader over the head with how they are related, but they come together to form the foundation of the themes in the novel.

And since Dangerosa mentioned it, I just have to quote that one amazing paragraph, as it is also one of my favorites in all of literature:

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather, the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

I can read that in the dead of a Buffalo winter and still feel the heat of an Alabama summer.

I thought one part was really clever — where the kid Cecil :wink: in school says “Ol’ Adolf Hitler’s been prosecutin’ them Jews.” The teacher corrects him: “Persecuting, Cecil.”

This was a telling moment, since prosecutin’ was exactly what the town had been doing to the innocent Black guy, and Lee very deftly links that with Fascism by making it an innocent mixup of words from the mouths of babes.

You know, I didn’t catch onto ANY of this. I seriously doubt my teachers were smart enough to figure it out either.

It doesn’t make me like the book, I still think it’s incredibly smarmy at its core, but I hate it less now.

I thought it was ok… better than most of the assigned books the year I had to read it.

But quite frankly, I don’t remember it much. What I do remember was being in one of the two advanced 9th grade english classes with people who were supposedly smarter than your average bear - and none of them had ever heard of lynching before. And I got to be The Black Girl. Which sucked. But no where near as much as Huckleberry Finn sucked for the next three years.

So, perhaps I should look at it again.

Daowajan,

As an English teacher who despises canonical literature in school, I’d advise that you put the book down and come back to it in a few years. It’ll be much, much better then.

phouka makes a good point. I like the book a lot, but for me it wasn’t assigned reading. It was a book I chose to read.

amarinth, I’d say if this book served to wake a class of 9th graders up to some facts about race relations in America not that long before our time, it performed a worthwhile service. Considering the state of our educational system, some of them might otherwise never have learned anything about lynching. Re Huck Finn, how did it suck for three years? Did you study it three years in a row? This seems rather odd. That’s another book I read on my own, although we read it in school later. It never seemed to me to be about race. It was just a book that had one black guy among the multitude of charaters.

(Appliance repairman voice) Well there’s your problem right there: you been readin’ a 7th grade book in the 9th grade.

Is that because TKAM has the dreaded “N” word in it, same as Huckleberry Finn? You should be introduced to Tom & Huck in the 6th grade and Scout & Boo in the 7th, and then you can re-read in later years for subtext all you want.

In the 8th grade you should be ready to read how Elmer Gantry’s liberal classmate is literally blinded by religious bigots, or how Jay Gatsby is figuratively blinded by class envy.

Kids in the 9th grade should be onto the books that don’t have happy endings, like The Painted Bird, 1984 or Darkness at Noon (or today’s counterparts to these books). Schools should graduate you kind of pissed off at how messed up the world is.

But things may have changed regarding what’s being read and when in today’s schools. Maybe all you should be trained to read are tech manuals and The Bridges of Madison County.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those books that I read first in junior high, didn’t mind it but didn’t love it, and then came back years later to read – and loved it.

Unfortunately, I think much of the finer points are lost on age group it is typically recommended for, and if you don’t pick up on some of the finer points, you fail to realize the significance of the book. Daowajan, I rather doubt your teachers were not smart enough to figure it out – speaking as a former junior high language arts teacher myself, I simply think that, like most teachers having to teach to 25-30 students, they simply didn’t get a chance to delve very deeply into it.

As far as why I like the book, I happen to be one of many tiny twigs on my mother and father’s very Southern family trees. I think one reason why the book ended up appealing so much to me is that much of the imagery Lee uses brings back recollections of visiting relatives in tiny hole-in-the-wall Southern towns and the way of life that prevailed there. Southern towns are not all made up of African-American hating whites, and not all Southerners are racist bigots – far from it. I think Lee did an outstanding job of painting the picture of the society – and then showing an event that polarized it. I also think there is a parallel between the society in the town and Scout herself, both changed, saddened and matured by the trial and its outcome, but I’ll shut up here rather than starting to run on any more. :slight_smile:

In defense of reading lists, I will say that although I have always been an inveterate reader (I recall that one of my grade cards actually had a complaint from a teacher saying I read too much, all the time and incessantly), if it had not been for required reading lists, I probably would never have heard about OR tried some books that I ended up loving. This is one of them.

I have to say, I don’t remember that. I haven’t read it since grade ten and I’m laughing out loud at the thought of it, but I honestly don’t remember that.

Just more motivation for me to read the book, I’ve been wanting to do it for awhile now.

The passage that struck me most in the book was a bit of characterization for Atticus. The entire book portrays him as a lone defender… a martyr, even… of equality, yet when Scout swears, he tells her not to do it because it’s common. In my mind, something as little as that is indicative of something awesome.

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What the hell happened in the ending of the book? Did Jem kill Bob Ewell, or did Boo? I argued up and down that it was Jem, because that made more sense to me, but our ditzy teacher was adamant it was Boo.

Who’s right? I just have to know, I asked a friend and he seemed to think Jem did it, but I’m nervous because, as stupid as our teacher was, that’s a hell of a mistake for an English major to make.

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