She Treads Softly: To Kill a Mockingbird

Monday, May 28, 2007

To Kill a Mockingbird

I read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee again in preparation for reading her biography, Mockingbird. Any book review I could compose wouldn't do To Kill a Mockingbird justice. It really is a classic that should be read and reread, often, throughout your life.

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I'm having some more anxiety and depression over the house not selling yet. We really need to sell within the next 3 weeks, if not our lives will become much more complicated. I'm feeling very ineffective and hopeless.

1 comment:

Jane said...: This is one I have never read. I want to read this one! I will check it out at the library next month when I return the stack I've got now.

Lori~ I am praying every day for you & for your house to sell. I can't imagine how frustrating this must be for you!; May 28, 2007 at 7:50 AM

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.