The great American novel

To Kill A Mock­ing­bird is one of the five best nov­els ever writ­ten, and I’m not sure what the oth­er four were. I just fin­ished read­ing it for prob­a­bly the fifth time, this time out loud. One thing for sure, read­ing aloud makes it hard­er to miss nuances.

Read­ing To Kill A Mock­ing­bird aloud was a plea­sure in some ways and dif­fi­cult in oth­ers. Even if I weren’t a damn yan­kee read­ing Alaba­ma dia­logue, I was brought up bet­ter than to say «nig­ger». Unlike a lot of oth­er words, some of them pret­ty hor­ri­ble, that I’m ful­ly capa­ble of say­ing aloud, that one was awk­ward and repeat­ed again and again through the book.

If you haven’t read To Kill A Mock­ing­bird in the last half a decade, shame on you. If you haven’t ever read it, shame on your high school Eng­lish teachers.

One Reply to “The great American novel”

  1. TKAM is the fourth “most
    TKAM is the fourth “most influ­en­tial book for Amer­i­cans today” accord­ing to a sur­vey con­duct­ed joint­ly by the Library of Con­gress and the Book of the Month Club. The Bible was first and my per­son­al favorite, Atlas Shrugged, was second.

    If every­body reread AS and TKAM every decade, the world would be a bet­ter place. They both make you con­scious­ly want to be a bet­ter person. 

    Dad