To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
First published 1960.
This is an incredibly well-known book that I remember reading in high-school - I think it was even our book study. Although the generalisation is that books you have studied at high-school are 'ruined forever' for you, I remember quite enjoying this book, to the point where I offered it as a choice to read to Elise. However, after only a chapter, we weren't feeling it as a co-read, and so put it down.
Recently, I decided to pick it up as a solo book, and have now re-read it for the first time since highschool.
A few things strike me about To Kill a Mockingbird after this second read.
Firstly: it is a good book. My memory was not faulty on that front. Telling the story of a lawyer in the southern states of America during the 1930s who is defending a black man accused of rape, the book cleverly chooses the perspective of the lawyer's young daughter, 'Scout', as its point-of-view. This means that we get quite a heavy story, but filtered through the innocence of youth, and allows us as the reader to sympathise with Scout and her brother Jem as they learn difficult life lessons about prejudice.
Taking Scout's point-of-view also means that author Harper Lee can lecture the reader in a way that feels authentic to the plot, because the lectures take the form of a young girl wrestling with how the world is. At one point, Scout is struck by the way one of her teachers condemns Hitler for persecuting Jews, and yet also sees no issue in considering black people as inferior!
Secondly: although it is a good book, I am glad Elise and I decided not to read this one together, as the amount of n-words in the book is quite high, and I would feel uncomfortable trying to decide how to narrate it! I also would not choose it as a book to study at high-school for similar reasons. The uses of the word fit the story being told, and add to its authenticity, but... yeah... I can't remember how my highschool teacher worked around this. Unless we all just read it at home. Probably that, right?
Thirdly: although this isn't primarily why I chose to read it, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. Although the list of Pulitzer Prize winners includes some books I have heard of, this is the first one I've ever read, and I can safely say that I enjoyed this more than any of the Booker Prize winning books I have yet read (and I have now read 27 of them). Some of the Booker books were enjoyable enough for what they were, but To Kill a Mockingbird just feels a lot more meaningful, purposeful even...
It does make me wonder whether the Pulitzer Prize list might end up more achievable for me than the Booker list, even though the former is considerably longer. Or it might just be that I started with the best one on the list!
But, we shall see.
Completed 2 September 2025.
(Pulitzer Winning Fiction)
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