A-Z Wednesday: To Kill a Mockingbird

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:

1. A photo of the book
2. Title and synopsis
3. A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
4. Come back here and leave your link in the comments

If you’ve already reviewed this book, post a link to the review as well. Be sure to visit other participants to see what books they have posted and leave them a comment (we all love comments, don’t we?) Who know? You may find your next “favorite” book.

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: T

My “T” Book is:

To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

(New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1982)

Paperback, 281 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780446310789, US$4.99

From the Cover: The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill a Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was alter made into an Academy Award winning film, also a classic. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill a Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior—to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 15 million copies in print and translated into ten languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

My Review: Once again, I break with my A-Z Wednesday tradition of posting obscure books from my collection and post not only a well-known book, but a classic among classics. Yet, how could I not post Lee’s perennial classic for the letter “T”? To Kill a Mockingbird has been one of my favorite books since I first read it in middle school … and my appreciation of it has only grown with time. It is as near perfect a novel as there is out there, the characters are completely likeable (well, maybe not the Ewells) and believable, the story is timeless and so very touching, and Lee’s prose is absolutely stunning. Scout is one of the best narrators that there is in literature to date (and I honestly don’t think a replacement will be coming any time soon … it’s certainly not Bella Swan), and there is just so much there that I fear I am gushing and incoherent and not doing the book any justice whatsoever.

There is so much magic in this novel, from Scout’s narrative voice, to the mystery of Boo Radley, to the overall message of tolerance and understanding, that it is no wonder that it has endured as long as it has. I love this book, it has worked its magic on me, and what’s more, I have seen it work its magic on others. Working, as I did, as an assistant teacher to seventh and eighth graders for three years, one of the novels that is required reading for the eighth graders is To Kill a Mockingbird, and I have seen even the most ardent self-professed “non-readers” become engrossed in and engage with Lee’s book, but, the most satisfying experience I have had with a student and Mockingbird was with a seventh grader, will call her K.B.

The teacher I work with did a classic novel reading unit wherein the seventh graders had to pick a “classic” novel from a list we had put together. Often students didn’t know what book to pick and would turn to either myself or the teacher for advice on picking a book. K.B. did just that, asking what novel I thought she might like. She is, without a doubt, one of the brightest students I have ever come across, and so I recommended To Kill a Mockingbird. She checked it out of the school’s library and immediately fell in love with it. In fact, she confessed to me afterward that she had racked up considerable fines from the library because she kept it over a month after the due date (she read it three or four times over). I ended up giving her her own copy of the book as a Christmas gift, just so she wouldn’t have to pay too much.

To Kill a Mockingbird really is one of the great American novels, and easily the equal of, say, Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter or The Catcher in the Rye.

I review it HERE, and the audio HERE.