2010 book 172

Mary McDonagh Murphy, ed. Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird
I'm not sure where to start with this one. It's a book of essays (well, not really essays, which becomes clear partway through: some read as essays--the ones by writers--the rest like the answers to interviews with the questions cut out) about To Kill a Mockingbird, mostly by writers, but also from locals, Harper Lee's sister, Tom Brokaw, and Oprah. There's an introductory essay that reads at times like a college term paper, quoting the essays/interviews in the rest of the book (and taking their best parts). I guess I'd recommend this with the caveat that you should skip the intro stuff and just read the essays by the people that interest you. In light of essays like this*, which kind of denounces the book, I hoped this would mount a stronger defense of its virtues. And some parts did, but on the whole, it's not very readable. B-.

What interested me was that--like when I wrote about the book recently--almost everyone talked about how old they were and where they were the first time they read it. I guess it's one of those books that just sticks in your brain that way.

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*Look, I agree that Atticus' offhand comment about Sam Levy and the KKK is not at all historically accurate--but Scout is what, 6 or 7 in that scene? What kind of dad would tell the horrible truth about the KKK to a little kid? And anyway, I do think Lee conveys the menace of that kind of mob in the jailhouse scene, so she's not really whitewashing things. Of course, I clearly think the book is a capital-C Classic.