To Kill A Mockingbird

Wow, this book is long..  I don't remember "1984" being nearly this long.. nor "Swiss Family Robinson".. Here I am, inundated with information and humor and sadness and the life of a child turning into a young adult during the Depression and I'm not even halfway through.  It's a great book.. and at the moment, I'd have to put it above "1984" simply for it's ability to connect and be so true to what the South was.. and is.

In the manner that "1984" was seemingly post-apocalyptic and deadly and so gritty it could turn true in a moment, "To Kill A Mockingbird" is so real and so utterly believable to be told from the eyes of a seven year old.  Loiuse Jean Finch, or Scout, as most people call her in the book, is a very smart little girl.  I think I love the language of the book the most, however.  It isn't the talking... that is mostly Southern English, and we hear enough of that growing up.  It's the narrative in the in-between parts.  I'll give two examples:


"The second grade was grim, but Jem assured me that the older I got the better school would be, that he started off the same way, and it was not until one reached the sixth grade that one learned anything of value. The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me—he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn’t see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn’t? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts."

"For reasons unfathomable to the most experienced prophets in Maycomb County, autumn turned to winter that year. We had two weeks of the coldest weather since 1885, Atticus said. Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves."

It's very beautiful writing.. so I recommend it to anyone.  And in this case, as is the same with many others I've read (though much more in my opinion in this case because of the exquisite prose she uses), the book is far better than the movie.  You don't get this type of writing translated onto the screen.  Words like unfathomable and aberrations don't translate well into picture.

That's all for now.  It's time to head out to Life Group.. hope the day goes well for everyone.