Brave New World – 4/5 Stars Another book I read in high school and college, but hadn’t re-read for 15 or so years. I was thinking about using this for a unit on dystopian literature in my English 12 Special Ed classes, but for a few reasons and a few conversations I don’t really want to have with students, I don’t think I will after all. For one, the sexuality in the book is a lot more forward than I originally remembered, and includes some […]
We’re all flawed
It’s impossible to write a review of Harper Lee’s ”Go set a watchman” without comparing it to her masterpiece ”To kill a mockingbird”. My comparison is short: The former not even close to the latter. ”To kill a mockingbird” is a classic for a reason. That’s not to say that ”Go set a watchman” is a bad book; it has many redeeming features. But more on that later. Jean Louise (aka Scout) Finch, one of the central characters of TKAM, is now an adult. She […]
“every man’s watchman, is his conscience.”
I don’t remember much about To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s been over a decade since I read it, and I regret not re-reading it before beginning Go Set a Watchman. I kept trying to remember if Henry, Dr. Finch and Alexandra had factored into the first book or were new characters to replace Calpurnia, Jem and Dill. Jean Louise “Scout” Finch has returned home to Maycomb, from New York, for her annual two week vacation. Her lawyer father, Atticus, is in poor health and being minded for by his […]
Clueless
I had a lot of good reasons for not wanting to read this book. Even before all the pearl-clutching reviews came out bemoaning the racism of a beloved character, before the stories that pointed out how we’ve always misunderstood the race component of To Kill a Mockingbird [TKAM] anyway, I suspected that a sequel to a classic novel was bound to disappoint. And the strange circumstances of its publication, after decades of the author and her sister saying it never would be, further dampened any […]