To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee

‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’

A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel – a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man’s struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

Let me start off by saying that I did enjoy their book, it’s well written and the characters are engaging. At the same time, though, I was disappointed by it; the story is far lighter than I expected from everything I had heard about the book, and the trial being dealt with by Atticus Finch, the focus of so much of the talk, is far enough away from the focus it’s a struggle to call it the backdrop.

This billed as a complex and slightly controversial story about the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman, and maybe when it was first released that’s how it was seen, and I suspect there are a number of people, like me, who have read the book expecting one thing and found it to be another. For me it’s a story about how two siblings and a new friend spend their summer, and that’s fine because it’s enjoyable, but it’s not what I was after.

If you’re thinking of reading this expecting a real American classic, prepare to be disappointed, but if you’re just after a good read, go for it.

2nd challenge

After deciding to challenge myself to read The Telegraph’s top 100 books of all time, I thought I would also challenge myself to read all of Charles Dickens’ books. I’ve read some of these before, before now I’m going to read them all, and in order – it won’t be easy and it won’t be quick, but I’ll get there. I’m looking forward to it actually.

Novels

The Pickwick Papers
Oliver Twist
Nicholas Nickleby
The Old Curiosity Shop
Barnaby Rudge
Martin Chuzzlewit
Dombey and Son
David Copperfield
Bleak House
Hard Times
Little Dorrit
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
Our Mutual Friend
The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Shorts

American Notes
The Battle of Life
The Chimes: A Goblin Story
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Tree
A Dinner at Poplar Walk
Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions
A Flight
Frozen Deep
George Silverman’s Explanation
Going into Society
The Haunted Man
Holiday Romance
The Holly-Tree
Hunted Down
The Long Voyage
Master Humphrey’s Clock
A Message from the Sea
Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy
Public Life of Mr. Trumble, Once Mayor of Mudfog
Sketches by Boz
The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton
Sunday under Three Heads
Tom Tiddler’s Ground
Travelling Abroad – City of London Churches
The Uncommercial Traveller
Wreck of the Golden Mary

 

1st challenge

I discovered this list on another blog this morning, I forget the name of the blog but the list comes originally from The Telegraph, a national newspaper here in the UK. Below is what The Telegraph considers to be the top 100 books of all time.

Being someone whose reading level has always been above his age (I was reading adult books when only ten) I was surprised to discover I’ve only read 5 of these. Since that’s the case, and I feel a little disappointed in myself over it, I am challenging myself to read all of these books – it’s going to take me quite a while to get through them, I’ve been so focused on my writing recently that my reading has taken a back seat, but I’m hoping this will help fix that.

Wish me luck.

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes

2. Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe

4. Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift

5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding

6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson

7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne

8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos

9.  Emma Jane Austen  

10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley

11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock

12. The Black Sheep Honoré De Balzac

13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal

14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas

15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli

16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens

17. Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë

18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë  

19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray  

20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne  

21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville

22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert

23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins

24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll

25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott  

26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope

27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot

29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky

30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James

31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

32. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson

33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome

34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde

35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith   

36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy

37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers

38. The Call of the Wild Jack London

39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad

40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame  

41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust

42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence

43.  The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford

44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan

45. Ulysses James Joyce

46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf

47. A Passage to India EM Forster

48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

49. The Trial Franz Kafka

50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway

51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine

52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner

53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley

54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh

55. USA John Dos Passos

56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler

57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford

58. The Plague Albert Camus

59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell

60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett

61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger

62. Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor

63. Charlotte’s Web EB White

64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien

65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis

66. Lord of the Flies William Golding

67. The Quiet American Graham Greene  

68 On the Road Jack Kerouac

69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov

70. The Tin Drum Günter Grass

71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe

72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark 

73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee  

74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller

75. Herzog Saul Bellow

76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez

77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor

78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carré

79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison

80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge

81. The Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer

82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Italo Calvino

83. A Bend in the River VS Naipaul

84. Waiting for the Barbarians JM Coetzee

85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson

86. Lanark Alasdair Gray

87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster  

88. The BFG Roald Dahl

89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi

90. Money Martin Amis

91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro

92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey

93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera

94. Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie

95. LA Confidential James Ellroy

96. Wise Children Angela Carter

97. Atonement Ian McEwan   

98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman

99. American Pastoral Philip Roth

100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald

I shall transfer this to a page later so I can keep you all updated on how I go with it, and also put up reviews of the books as I complete them.