“A celebrity among classics, I just read this for the first time at the age of 29. I don’t know how I ducked it up until now, although my memories of school and reading are sort of like that part in Lethal Weapon where they compare scars.
“Yeah, check this out. Scarlet Letter, O’brien’s class.”
“That’s nothing. Taming of the Shrew. Ellis, 8 AM block.”
“Oh yeah? Boom. Tale of Two Cities. Johnston. Right. After. Lunch. And, AND, we’re reading it out loud.”
So I guess you’ll have to excuse me for not making sure I hit all the classics.
There are two things that come up a lot when reading this book, other than the phrase, “Do you have to read it for a class?”
One is that this seems to be well-regarded as a good read, at least as classics go.
I think it’s warranted. I had a couple laughs, mostly because the main character hates school so much that she tries various schemes to get out of it, sort of like the wacky neighbor on a sitcom who’s always concocting a new way to make a million bucks. My favorite scheme was experimenting with swearing. That one hit home. Hit it real fucking shit ass hard.
It also was more relatable than a lot of classics. It had a neighborhood I could recognize, a court where the judge wasn’t dressed like some kind of weird king. There’s a school pageant. There’s the weird haunted house that all the kids are afraid of. All stuff that I could understand, probably due to the fact that it was published in 1960, which is shockingly contemporary for a classic. Seriously, check out this list: http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/classic-literature
400 years old is bad enough. Then you get to the Odyssey. Jesus Christ.
The Canterbury Tales is purportedly hilarious. Or bawdy, rather. Bawdy seems to be the word people use when they mean something is funny in a sex way that’s too old-timey for me to understand. It means that they’ll use weird terms for things, like “picking up the old bridle while wearing white gloves, if you get me.”
And seriously, all I can think of when I read stuff that old is going back in time with a machine gun. I wonder if you went back to Odyssey days if you would just be unstoppable. Maybe an arrow would get you eventually? Then I start thinking about bringing kevlar and night vision and things get real nuts. It’s hard for me to focus on the narrative is what I’m saying here.
Anyway, I’m sure a lot of this older stuff was probably good, but it’s too old for me to really appreciate. Mockingbird is pretty good now, but it just seems foolish to ignore the fact that this book is really on the contemporary end of the classics spectrum and to miss attributing some of my enjoyment to that fact.
The other thing I hear a lot is questioning about why Harper Lee only wrote this one book. If it’s so great, and if she did this one right out of the gate, why stop?
I can’t really speculate on her motivations. But I can say why I’m down with it.
Every band, almost without exception, puts out at least one more album than they should. One is a low number. One if they’re lucky.
Any number of theories go into it. There’s the common wisdom that you have your whole life to write the first album and about 9 months to write the second one. There’s the idea that people become famous and lose touch with what made them great artists. There’s the idea that you wrote what you knew, and now you have to either learn something else or write something you don’t know. Any one or any combination of these could be true.
It would be pretty killer if a band put out their one great album and called it a life. I can respect that. I can respect someone who walks away when they’ve done what they wanted to do.
Maybe Harper Lee had something even better in her. Maybe not. It’s impossible to say. In fact, even if she published something else it would be impossible to say as no matter what she did, it would be relentlessly compared to Mockingbird. There’s no escape from legacy, and it doesn’t matter if the legacy is good or bad.
The only thing I can really say definitively is that we should be fine with it. Let’s not demand more and more and more from people who create stuff. You know who probably knows best whether she has another good book in her? Harper Lee. If she doesn’t feel like it, or doesn’t want to, or is certain her next book isn’t very good, that’s her prerogative, and we’d do ourselves a service if we started respecting that kind of decision. Yeah, she might be wrong. But it’s her choice to make.”