Like so many other classics force-fed to me in junior high and high school, To Kill A Mockingbird was a total blur to me. When it was assigned, I read it quickly and bitterly and then promptly forgot it. Yesterday I picked it up on a whim--I'd watched a documentary on Harper Lee and found myself interested in the book again mostly because people were saying that the character Dill was modeled on a young Truman Capote. Capote wasn't force-fed to me in junior high or high school and I've loved him solid for the last 15 years.
My reread of Mockingbird now really feels like a first read, and I can barely begin to explain how much I enjoyed it. The narrator's character is plucky and relentless and a hundred years before her time. Lee's plotting and pacing are the stuff that manuals should be written from. Sadly, the story of a white community's racist and classist ugliness is as relevant now as it was fifty years ago.
My one major gripe is that too often it's clear that different narrative orchestrations are meant to advance the author's purpose. Though there's almost always some grounding in the children's slow and thorny journey to understanding an intractable problem, that alone can't keep the narrative from feeling oppressively preachy and heavy-handed at times. Still, it's a fucking remarkable story.
I'm left wondering what should be done to school reading lists. I know that, at minimum, this book and The Great Gatsby were lost to me for years simply because they were thrown at me when I was too young. Then again, what should we be telling teenagers to read? Any ideas?
9 comments:
Felt the same about Camus - it was hard to read then - now - it just makes so much more sense. I think things like Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift are good for teens'
I'd say fewer novels, and more short stories. Fewer workhorses of English canon. I didn't mind Mockingbird, and I loved Gatsby, but Great Expectations was incredibly tedious (the man was paid by the word), and I think I'd have to be stuck on a desert island to want to read Pride and Prejudice.
I don't think the problem is the reading lists; it's the idiots teaching it.
I agree with the Brother. My high school English teachers were bored and obviously just clocking in their time until they could retire.
I know that this is a radical idea, but I think that we should let the kids choose for themselves. Yes, that means they will be reading Twilight. That stupid book speaks to them at their maturity level. Foster a love of reading, and they will eventually find their way to better books.
Also, I don't understand the Austen hate. She was a fantastic writer. The thing that I really love about Jane is that she took women's lives seriously. And she is still one of the few writers who depict money issues in depth. I've noticed that most writers either make money a nonissue (rich characters) or have characters that are overly dramatic about it (characters who sell drugs to make rent). Money drives the plot of Austen novels but in a realistic way. You know that finances are weighing heavily on her characters, but it is almost unspoken. They aren't being tied to a railroad track because they can't make rent.
Wow, I had a lot to say about Austen.
Yeah. I was in my 30s before I loved Willa Cather, and then I Really Loved Her. But trying to slog through My Antonia in high school was agonizing. As was Great Expectations. And the teachers kept raving about what great literature Great Ex was and I was like, then literature sucks. My love of mysteries and science fiction was born of my loathing for "great literature" force fed by teachers in high school.
I do remember loving Shakespeare even then though. I think letting kids read whatever they want is never a bad thing--reading is reading, and if it got published it has SOME merit (though often not much). I'd let kids choose about 2/3rds of what they read, and then I'd do a much better job of getting them interested in selected classics.
And I'm totally with Googie on the Austen love.
I gave a panel talk on To Kill a Mockingbird last year--the panel was women writers and the books women wrote that were their first literary loves. I did TKAM, someone else did Mrs Dalloway and the third panelist did Jane Eyre. So glad you like this book--I love it. But then again, I read it on my own long before it was assigned in school.
I agree that good teachers would help, but I had good teachers with a lot of these and just never engaged. Seems like timing is everything, and there might just be a limit to the nuance that's accessible to a teenager. I just wish I could go back and tell my younger self that I'd grow into so many things I thought I hated. (You know, like olives and beer and mushrooms).
7th grade for Jane has read the following thus far:
The Outsiders
The Hounds of the Baskervilles
The Pearl
She is absolutely OBSESSED with these books. I think they go on to poetry when the winter break ends. I'm anxious to see how that goes.
How about Catcher in the Rye or One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest or Brave New World? Something "alternative," if you will, not necessarily part of the canon, but still great literature.
For me, it was definitely the teachers that made me love or hate a book. My freshman year, I was introduced to Shakespeare (Romeo & Juliet) and Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities). I loved both, wholeheartedly - taught to me by a teacher I ADORED. Sophomore year, I skimmed through To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, and Les Miserables and felt apathetic about all of them... my teacher was horrible - in her 60s, sick of high school kids, and just biding her time until she could retire. Junior year, I had another wonderful teacher (but can't really remember what we read). Senior year (AP English), our teacher let us read what we wanted in a sense, but the books had to be approved by him. They had to meet a certain literary criteria. We also read a lot of essays, which I enjoyed - but again, it was a great teacher.
I later read To Kill a Mockingbird (a couple of years ago) and it's one of my favorite books. I think if a teacher can tell you why THEY love the book (and also why you should at the very least have a strong opinion about the book), you're much more likely to be engaged in reading and learning. I also think that the idea of art as a means of social change is under-taught in schools. You're told to read all of these books but you should also be told WHY you're supposed to read them - how they fit into history, how they tell a greater story than what's written on the page. I didn't really get any of that until college - in high school, you don't get a lot of "why," you just get a lot of "do."
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