The best books are those the make your reality vanish. In some ways even the words on the page vanish as you are emmersed in the world ofthe story
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of those books. The first time I read it I never got to finish it because, well, the beginning was so good. Being narrated by the daughter of lawyer Atticus Finch, Scout recaptured my childhood. It is a book so well known, so prided and I seemed to be the last person to have read it. My own childhood in a small village, playing outdoors with my brother as Scout does with Jem, came flooding back to me. I can’t analyse, like the literature I’m meant to be, how the magic is created with this book. But the long dusty evenings of Scout, Jem and their sweet friend Dill’s were so familiar that while reading I feel the essence of being a child again. Like the Alabama setting of Maycomb, our village had its eccentrics and ‘folk’ stuck in their ways.
I have only read to the end of the court case and the verdict so far so please don’t give any spoilers. It has just struck me that for a book centered around racial tolerence it is the theme of the home and childhood that makes this book so real to me. It conveys those summer hours after school felt like days to be filled. I want to know what happens these people, these dear and believable characters. Most of my reading time this week has been for uni and I just want to put it all aside and know how it ends so that I can start the long awaited Go Set a Watchman that I promised I would read over the summer and haven’t had enough time to before uni has swung around again. And of course I am hoping my mental itch is scratched; does Boo Radley make an appearance?
Like me, do you love this book too? Let me know- without giving away the plot- what you think of this book in the comments below.
Thoughts of Ariadne 