To Kill a Mockingjay.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
I know, I said I wanted to be better at this then I didn't. Then that snowballed. Inertia! I'm going to keep pushing against this "super casual, short, stream of consciousness" writing style again, because I want to start writing in here but if I feel like capital-W writing I should be, you know, working on something else, probably. Let's make this fun & relaxing. Babble, babble everywhere. So this was an Eleven-Books Club pick, by fatbutts. Somehow we'd all (Liz excepted) missed it from the canon! In my case not surprisingly, since I wasn't an English major & was a troublesome high school student; I have big holes in the "Western Canon." I thought Boo Radley was their black neighbor who would end up getting blamed for the kids hijinks, or something, that was what I thought going in. I ended up liking the writing, especially how she verbed nouns & alternated between dialogue & exposition. It shares some difficulties with Kindred, in that some of the "racism is bad, mkay?" is a little "preaching to the choir," but more than that it stood out how timely it remained. The Staten Island grand jury, Ferguson, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin...the racist narratives in this book haven't shifted all that much. We had a long discussion about racism & misogyny, as well; a rape trial where the whole point is not to believe the laying woman? Yeah, things haven't changed that much on that front, either. I liked this book; I wasn't blow away by it but I get the hubub, I can see why it is a classic. (Also, looking at the pictures I've been taking, I've sort of claimed the chair in the living room as "my space" lately, huh?)
