Baby Got Books

Again with the Southern Literature

It dawned on me recently that I might be the only person in America over the age of fifteen who hasn’t read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Sure, I know the names Scout, and Atticus Finch, and even Boo Radley (who lent his name to a great British band of the 1990′s). But I hadn’t read the book, and I hadn’t seen the movie. But we had a copy on our bookshelf, and my wife recently re-read it and seemed to enjoy it. So I decided to give it a shot.

It is absolutely a coincidence that I had just finished Toney Earley’s Jim the Boy, also a book that centered on a young southerner during the Great Depression. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that’s my new favorite sub-genre. But it really was a coincidence. Not to say, though, that as I read To Kill a Mockingbird, Jim the Boy wasn’t clearly in the front of my mind, and that I couldn’t help but look for similarities and differences between the two. And overall, while both are great books, I can’t say that there’s a whole lot of similarity between them; Lee’s and Earley’s writing styles are very different, the books were written forty-some years apart, and the stories they tell are drastically different. Certain themes are definitely present in both: racism, rural poverty, and other blights that haunted this country at that time. And both mention “haints”, a word that I had never seen or heard before and had to look up (it basically means a ghost).

But while Jim the Boy is simply a captivating and engaging tale of one year in one boy’s life, To Kill a Mockingbird is really a deeper story about how these negative elements manifested themselves in the South at that time. I have to admit that I almost gave up on this book because the first half of it was pretty uneventful. I’m not a particularly patient reader, and Lee certainly takes her sweet time setting the stage for the characters and events that will take place in the second half of the book. But I persevered, and I’m glad I did.

By the way, going back to my first sentence above, I’m not going to tell you anything about what happens in this book, because I’m assuming you already know.

Books, Fiction, Review | Shaft | July 10, 2008 8:10 am

4 Comments

By russ, July 10, 2008 @ 8:47 am

ahem….coughcoughineverreaditeithercough
By Shaft, July 10, 2008 @ 12:44 pm

I’ll give you the lowdown next time I see you.
By Elizabeth, July 11, 2008 @ 10:38 am

Though this might be a test for a non-patient reader, and though it doesn’t quite fit into your sub-genre, Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend is a great book that has similarities. It might just be the setting, and it is definitely a few decades later, but the entire time I read this, I envisioned this as a faded-70′s color photograph in motion. (good summer read)