I’ve been meaning to reread To Kill a Mockingbird for a couple years now; CBR Bingo’s Fahrenheit 451 category was the perfect excuse to finally get around to rereading Harper Lee’s classic. According to the American Library Association To Kill a Mockingbird, which was first published in 1960, was the seventh most banned book in 2017. Most of the bans against Mockingbird come from its use of profanity and racial slurs as well as the adult themes of rape and incest but I think sometimes the most important books are […]
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 […]
“I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”
Straight up, this is a classic even among classics, and so I’m giving myself permission right up front for this review not to be important or add anything to the conversation at all. I don’t actually think I’m capable of saying anything that hasn’t already been said by people who said it better than I ever could. I feel like the only way this book can be reviewed now is either by looking at it through the context of today’s societal lens, or by relating […]