{"id":1352,"date":"2015-08-02T10:04:23","date_gmt":"2015-08-02T10:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=1352"},"modified":"2016-02-20T11:24:56","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T11:24:56","slug":"reading-to-kill-a-mockingbird-as-an-adult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/reading-to-kill-a-mockingbird-as-an-adult\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” As an Adult"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the first Hobbit<\/em> movie was coming out, I re-read the novel I loved as a kid to reacquaint myself with the story and was more enthralled than I expected to be.<\/p>\n

The wry voice was something I missed as a twelve-year-old in love with the adventure and fantasy, and I reconnected immediately with what moved me most the first time: the ways Bilbo’s fooled Gollum and the dragon. In each case, the small, clever Hobbit outwits a fierce enemy.\u00a0 That was a real treat for me as a bookish, picked-on kid with a tough older brother.<\/p>\n

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\nHarper Lee’s Scout also defeated monsters when she helped defuse the mob in front of the jail. It’s one of the best scenes in To Kill A Mockingbird<\/em>–if not entirely believable.\u00a0 But Scout herself doesn’t hold up for me today because I just don’t believe her voice. She often sounds too mature for an eight-year-old, like when she thought near the end of the book (according to her adult self) \u201cthere wasn\u2019t much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.”<\/p>\n

\"190px-Mockingbirdfirst\"<\/a>And I’m mixed about the book itself: it feels like an uneven blend of southern novel of manners with the “race novel” Lee originally intended, folded into a\u00a0 courtroom drama which seems clich\u00e9d–through no fault of hers. We’ve all read so much John Grisham and Scott Turow, or maybe I have as a long-time crime fiction reviewer.\u00a0 The story of the rape accusation takes way too long to get going.\u00a0 And in terms of suspense, the final appearance of Boo Radley is a letdown after all the mystery and tension.\u00a0 He’s just not that interesting.<\/p>\n

Some of Atticus’s sentiments also grated on my nerves, like his belief that “a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human.” That feels hopelessly naive and sentimental–especially when you consider that Lee wrote the book after The Holocaust.\u00a0 But closer to home, there was the brutality she saw in the south directed at Civil Rights protestors.<\/p>\n

Flannery O’Connor damned the novel with pretty faint praise when it came out: \u201cI think for a child\u2019s book it does all right.\u201d That seems unduly harsh (and unfair to YA literature). What works best for me as an adult reader is the local color, the barbed social comedy, and the graceful prose.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Of course the book\u2019s dramatic core couldn\u2019t be timelier: today’s America is still grappling with racial injustice just as Harper Lee’s fictional town was in Depression-era Alabama.\u00a0 That\u2019s sadly a story which seems to make the news every week–if not more often.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael’s 25 book Assault With a Deadly Lie<\/em> <\/a> is a suspense novel about militarized police.\u00a0 It was a finalist for a Midwest Book Award.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the first Hobbit movie was coming out, I re-read the novel I loved as a kid to reacquaint myself with the story and was more enthralled than I expected to be. The wry voice was something I missed as a twelve-year-old in love with the adventure and fantasy, and I reconnected immediately with what … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[373],"tags":[497,113,148,379,370,219,376,368,357,355,375,146,371,372,374,378,365,354,366,377],"class_list":["post-1352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-to-kill-a-mockingbird","tag-authors","tag-book-reviewers","tag-book-reviewing","tag-civil-rights","tag-courtroom-drama","tag-crime-fiction","tag-famous-novels","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-go-set-a-watchman","tag-harper-lee","tag-john-grisham","tag-movies","tag-novel-of-manners","tag-racism","tag-scott-turow","tag-suspense-novels","tag-the-hobbit","tag-to-kill-a-mockingbird","tag-tolkien","tag-young-adult-novels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2109,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions\/2109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}