Author: Harper Lee
Page count: 323
Format: Print, borrowed
Start date: July 13, 2011
End date: July 20, 2011
Thoughts/impressions:
So, the secondary theme of this blog/project seems to be "Books Ashley can't believe she hasn't read already because they're amazing." I think I had a complete and utter misconception of what this book was and it scared me away for years. I really regret not just reading it because then maybe I'd be rereading this amazing book rather than reading it for the first time.
As I've previously stated, I love a book with good characters, and the character of Scout drew me in right away. However, this is really the skill of Harper Lee, because Scout is the type of character I usually wouldn't identify with at all, and actually don't really identify with, but she was so fleshed out and interesting and wonderful that I couldn't stop reading about her and growing with her and I am so amazed with how this character developed in my mind.
Another instance of Harper Lee being amazing is the character of Atticus Fitch. I'm sure if you statistically analyzed the book, Atticus as a person and not an idea in the mind of his children is very rarely found in the pages. However, I love him. I empathize with him. I want to know more and more and more about him and yet I'm not left wanting in regards to his development with what we have.
Finally, I loved how many issues were addressed in this novel without being beaten over the head with them. Obviously, race is a huge part, as well as class, law, growing up, and even love, between family, friends, and maybe more. These ideas are just seamlessly blended into the narrative so that rather than reading like a manifesto or lecture or something similarly dry that needs to be studied, it reads like life and truth.
Quotes:
"Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies." (9)
"Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines about Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow - anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." (20)
"Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win." (87)
"I wanted you to see something about her - I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what." (128)
"Whether Maycomb knows it or not, we're paying the highest tribute we can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple." (269)
"Sometimes I think I'm a total failure as a parent, but I'm all they've got. Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him...if I connived at something like this, frankly I couldn't meet his eye, and the day I can't do that I'll know I've lost him. I don't want to lose him and Scout, because they're all I've got." (314)
Progress:
9/100
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