To Kill A Mocking Bird
General historical background - Summaries - Themes - Characterisation - Structure - Setting - Language - Historical and social context - Underlying morality.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
18mentions
17people
2011–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Some schools ban simple classics like Mark Twain or To Kill A Mocking Bird. They can F right off.
- > About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had the opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a teenager, but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The translation played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to rimes, but I believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully enjoy it. On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in high school, and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de chagrin". Somewhere in my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was awful, so pretentious and pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the end
That's interesting to me, I hated Balzac when I had to read it in school but I loved the Odyssey as a kid. Most of the classics I read and enjoyed as a kid (Voltaire's Contes Philosophiques, To kill a mocking bird, all the books from Maupassant, etc...) I read them for fun by myself without the school asking me to read them, on the other had I hated the books that I was forced to read (Rousseau's confessions, Balzac, Les Allumettes suédoises by Robert Sabatier)
It does show that being forced to read something does color your perception of it. I sometimes wonder what the best way to introduce literature without shoving it down student's throat but still getting them to read good classics.
- Oh boy, you fucked up now. Here are the books I read this past year that I felt were "Good", starting from the most recent :
To Kill A Mocking Bird (Insanely good)
True Grit (Insanely good)
The Little Friend (Good)
Priceless (Very good, about art theft)
The Secret History (Insanely good)
Ready Player One (Good, nerdy)
Shadow Divers (Very good, history nerd book)
Diary of Anne Frank (Very good)
Unbroken (Very good, way better than the movie)
With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Very good)
Seveneves (good, but I'm a Stephenson fanboy)
The Martian (Very good, but just watch the movie).
I read a bunch of other stuff, but that's what I found really "good" this past year.
- to kill a mocking bird: it was refreshing, looking for more simple books like this one
- To kill a mocking bird was the first novel i read in my life. I was only 11 (in 6th grade) at the time and took around 3-4 months (summer break) to complete it, to be honest this was the book that made me realize that reading english literature can be an extremely amazing and insightful experience. Granted i didn't understand many things that were in it at the time but it kept me hooked.
Also i remember thinking that jean was a boy till i was 20-30 pages in realizing that she was in fact a girl.
- I must respectfully disagree that it is outdated drivel. First, there are large pockets of racism still present throughout the US and the world at large. Even if you are fortunate enough to live in a place where it is simply not encountered, it will be encountered if you travel much.
Second, even if and when we reach a point in society where racism is truly gone, it is useful to know how we got there. To Kill a Mocking Bird not only helps show how society was before, it was itself a small piece of history that helped in a small way make society the way it is now with less racism.
Even if we reach a utopian day where its lessons are no longer relavent (and we are not there yet), it will remain a significant aid in understanding our history.
