To Kill a Mockingbird

I don’t think I know anybody who hasn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird. It has been on more than one of my class reading lists and I’m sure that isn’t unusual. It has also created a lot of controversy in the years since it was published in 1960.

But despite the continued hype and its essential nature in middle schools everywhere, the first time I read To Kill a Mockingbird it was just because my mum told me it was a good book. And she was right.

I have read To Kill a Mockingbird somewhere in the neighbourhood of a dozen times, and each time I read it I am struck by how much Harper Lee manages to cram into one novel. There is so much going on—summers with Dell, Boo Radley, the trial, the Finch’s family life, Scout and Jem at school, Jem and the magnolias, Atticus shooting the rabid dog—and still everything flows and stays together to give you a real picture of life in Maycomb, Alabama.

The first time I read the novel I was probably too young to fully grasp what was going on, but I do remember being absolutely fascinated by the food that Calpurnia made. To my knowledge, I have still never eaten nor seen a collard green and, mostly because of the way they come up over and over in this book (either in the kitchen or in the garden), I would really like to. It may seem like and strange detail to remember from such an important and racially-charged novel, but collard greens weren’t something I had encountered before and the discussion of racism was.

Later, though, when I reread it in high school (again, not for class purposes) I was struck by the way Lee described family life at the Finch home. And even just the way she described the house. As we get older I think we sort of forget how much your house matters to you when you’re a kid, and the way Lee describes the house is an important part of what makes Scout such a believable narrator (at least for me). Although I’ve never really been able to picture their street as anything more than a sketchy map, the specific houses described in the novel are very clear, as is the tree in front of the Radley’s house.

The trial, of course, is meant to the really chilling and poignant part of the story. And I suppose it is in a lot of ways (although the details that really stick out for me are the details Lee gives about the people present, the way the courtroom smelled, and how tired Atticus looked).

For me though, the scene that will always affect me the most is the attack on Scout in the dark when she’s walking home from the pageant.

In some ways, the very fact that she’s dressed as a ham makes the scene memorable. But in rereading it, I think it’s the confusion of what’s really going on that makes the attack so violent. I can almost feel the chicken wire on my arms and hear the sounds of the struggle and the noise of Jem’s arm being broken. That was the scene that drove everything home for me.

Looking back at that period of American history, we know that racism was rampant and that a black man on trial (even against such low-class whites as the Ewells—a detail Atticus makes sure to point out) would never get a fair verdict. Despite Atticus’ many lessons and his impassioned defense, the verdict isn’t so much surprising as it is disappointing. But the attack on Scout and Jem is shocking.

Having Bob Ewell attack Atticus’ kids, even though Ewell “won” the court case, cuts through all the academic historical context and forces you to see the violence behind the racism and the class prejudice. I’d like to think that Lee could see the civil rights movement on the horizon when she wrote this and understood that one day, a lot of readers would need something this intense to remind them of how bad things had been.

And that’s why I don’t understand all this nonsense about parents wanting to have the books taken out of school curriculum. Forgetting about an uncomfortable part of history will certainly not help us to not repeat it. And to diminish To Kill a Mockingbird to nothing more than a novel about racism does all readers a disservice.

To Kill a Mockingbird

By Harper Lee

First published in 1960 by J.B. Lippincott & Co. (cover image shown from Lippincott edition)

When a book changes your life

This must be radio week on Books Under Skin. A friend told me about the Chicago Public Radio show This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass, which puts out a weekly podcast. And on this week’s podcast, Glass presents four people whose lives were changed by books.

“You don’t meet many people who tell you that a book changed their lives,” Glass says. “It’s an appealing notion I think, because it’s nice to think that our lives could be changed. Just by an idea, by the vision of the world that happens in a book, instead of what our lives are often changed by, you know, dumb luck, tragedies, coincidences.”

The one-hour podcast covers playwright and Hollywood producer Alexa Junge and her love for Moss Hart’s autobiography Act One, author David Sedaris’ encounter with a smutty novel, the unlikely obsession of a construction worker named Roger with all-books Louis and Clark, and writer Megan Daum’s love of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books.

The podcast covers so many lovely things about books and their ability to really change the way you think about certain things, whether the broad ideas (such as life or love) or more specific things (such as as historical event, your parents, yourself, or something else entirely).

Interestingly enough, though, each of the people interviewed for the show ended reading and rereading the books that changed their lives; one read just wasn’t enough for any of them, which makes me wonder if the first encounter just isn't enough for a book to really take hold of you.

Alexa Junge explains the force that drove her to reread Act One obsessively as a feeling of comfort, and really, camaraderie.

“It felt like I was recognizing an old friend. It felt like a familiarity of ‘Oh, I found a home. This guy wants the same home like I want’.”

And in a lot of ways that sums up why I reread books as often as I do: there is a sense of going home, of returning to old friends to relive old memories. And if a book does indeed change your life, for better or worse, returning to it over and over again just makes sense.

To listen to the This American Life podcast, click here.

Ensemble, c’est tout (oddly translated as Hunting and Gathering)

Some novels demand to be reread quickly. In the case of Ensemble, c’est tout, I saw the movie, read the book, saw the movie again and reread the book in a matter of weeks. Maybe a little obsessive in hindsight, but there is so much depth here that even after rereading it for a third time last year, I feel like there’s a lot I haven’t absorbed.

Originally published in French (I have to admit that I haven’t read the English translation, though), Ensemble, c’est tout is set in Paris and revolves are the lives of Camille, Philibert, Franck and, later on, Franck’s grandmother Paulette.

I usually have trouble with stories that have more than one main-ish character or many storylines. In most cases I am dissatisfied with how the author brings everything together at the end. But that might be the key to Anna Gavalda’s novel: she doesn’t wait until the end to bring the characters together, but neither does she abandon their separate storylines once they are together. The beauty of this is that her characters feel like real people: they have lives together and lives apart, and the story doesn’t fall apart in expressing that.

Camille is an artist who works as a night-cleaner in an office building rather than acknowledge her talent. Philibert is an incredible historian who can’t get into a master’s program because of his nervous stutter, so instead he sells postcards outside of Parisian museums. Franck is a chef, highly skilled but angry at life. And Paulette is Franck’s grandmother; she’s too old to continue living by herself in her beautiful garden and, after a bad fall, is placed in a home, much to her chagrin.

Obviously, these are pretty one-dimensional portraits of the characters that make up Gavalda’s story, but in some ways that’s the most appropriate way to describe them because, at least for the first chunk of the book, they are only able to see themselves as one-dimensional. Later, though, as they are forced into human contact (they all end up living together in an apartment Philibert is looking after for his family) their view of themselves and of each other changes.

Ensemble, c’est tout translates roughly as “together, that’s all” or “together, that’s everything” and is actually taken directly from a line of dialogue spoken by Camille toward the end of the novel. It may seem like a fairly simple sentiment, but it gets at the heart of the issue Gavalda is exploring here: how do you let someone in and acknowledge that being yourself, alone, isn’t enough?

It isn’t that Gavalda is saying that you should allow other people to define your worth; rather, she’s saying that without opening yourself up to others, you’ll never really know who you are. And she does that without making this a story about the “power of love” (although it wouldn’t be fully honest to say this isn’t a love story to some degree). Rather, it’s a story about letting others see you the way you see yourself, and trusting them to understand and love you anyway.

Ensemble, c'est tout

by Anna Gavalda

First published in 2004 (cover image shown from J'ai Lu edition)

Because it all starts at the bookstore

For me, going to a bookstore has always been an exciting outing. Whether it was Woozles in Halifax, the Box of Delights in Wolfville, Gilbert Joseph in France or Novel Idea in Kingston, shopping for books has always been fun.

Today Shelagh Rogers’ CBC radio show The Next Chapter reported the closure of Pages Books & Magazines in Toronto and Granny Bates in St. John’s, both community staples in their own right (and certainly not the only independent Canadian bookstores to close in the last little while). Reports like this one are really sad, partly because I wonder whether the stores are closing because of the economy or because people just aren't patronizing them any more. I really hope it's not the latter, because we so need bookstores in our communities.

Bookstores, especially children’s bookstores such as Granny Bates, have the opportunity to make books magical. And really, grown-up bookstores have the chance to do that for adults, who almost need it more because it becomes so much harder to fit reading into your life as you get older. Either way, though, local and independent bookstores (and maybe Chapters on occasion too) are perfect places to browse, to discover new things and to find new interests.

I rarely know what I’m going to buy when I head to a bookstore, but I rarely leave empty-handed.

So, today I am celebrating bookstores. To listen to The Next Chapter, click here. To find an independent bookstore near you, check out the Canadian Booksellers Association.

(The pictured bookstore is Wayfarer Books Bought & Sold in Kingston, ON.)

Rocket Boys (or maybe you know it better as October Sky)

Rocket Boys (or, October Sky, as it is more commonly known) is just the sort of book you want to be reading in October. There’s something very clear about the sky in October, after the haziness of summer, and the nights aren’t so cold that you can’t go out and stargaze a little. So it’s a perfect month, really, to pull Rocket Boys off the shelf and give it another read.

Some people’s lives lend themselves to stories is an incredible way, and Homer “Sonny” Hickam Jr. is one of those people. Growing up in the West Virginia mining town of Coalwood, Sonny became obsessed with space and rocketry after seeing Sputnik (the first official Earth satellite) pass overhead.

In his enthusiasm he recruited (well, convinced) five friends to learn how to build rockets. Their first few attempts are disastrous (Sonny destroys his mother’s fence in one accident) but as the boys start to get a handle on rocketry—how to mix the chemicals to create a longer burn-time for more propulsion, how to make an effective nozzle, etc.—their rockets start to go higher and they start to draw attention from the townspeople, some of whom are supportive and some of whom are decidedly not.

Sonny’s father fits pretty squarely in the “not” category for most of the book. He can’t envision how a hobby in rocketry will pay off and thinks Sonny should just resign himself to a life in the mine. An opinion not shared by Sonny’s mother, who is happy to see her son chase his dreams with a freedom she wishes she shared.

After their first few rockets (and Sonny’s father’s strict order that none of the rocketry happen on mine land), the boys decide to move their operation just outside of town to a spot they dub Cape Coalwood. Their rockets become more sophisticated, launches start drawing a crowd, and before you know it they’re off to the state science fair.

But there’s a lot more to Rocket Boys than rocketry and dreams of space. Hickam writes about high school, fooling around in the back seat of a car, his parents’ marriage and all the seemingly little details that make up life when you’re a teenager in a small town. And, as inspiring and exciting as the story is, it’s mostly the small details that make this book so hilarious and, in some ways, so painful. Hickam doesn’t shield you from the harsh and unpleasant realities of coal mining or how difficult it is to be a kid who can’t understand the choices of his parents.

I’m not generally a huge fan of memoirs or autobiographies, mostly because I spend so much of my time wondering why the author felt their life was so interesting and unusual that I end up missing the story. But Hickam is a writer who knows how to hook you. His story is exciting and unusual and, although I’ve never spoken to the man, I get the feeling that he doesn’t pretend bad things didn’t happen, or that he didn’t do some bad things too.

And it’s that kind of honesty that makes this book so easy to come back to. By the end, you feel like you really know the characters and rereading Rocket Boys is like spending time with an old friend, reliving the good ol’ days and remembering all the people you left behind.

Rocket Boys (republished as October Sky)

by Homer Hickam

First published in 1998 (cover image shown from Delacorte Press edition)

The Freedom to Read

Today marks the start of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week. It's kind of crazy to think that we still have to deal with the banning of books in schools, and if you think it's just an American problem, the Canadian Library Association's list of banned and/or challenged books and magazines is pretty illuminating.

And it isn’t just a problem of the past, either. Just last year a group of parents tried to have Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale banned from a Grade 12 English class at Lawrence Park Collegiate in Toronto. (The parents failed in their challenge and the book remains in the curriculum.)

Other books on both the CLA and ALA lists of banned and/or challenged books include: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange. I have read three of these four books (all in high school) and will be writing about To Kill a Mockingbird at some point in the next little while.

Of the total CLA list of banned/challenged books (which goes back to the 60s), I have read 14 titles (but I included series as one title). Of the titles on the ALA list, I have read only 9 (but the list is only a top-100); another 20 or so have been on my to-read list for a few years, though.

So, do you read banned books? How do you do against the Library Associations’ lists? And, does seeing a book title on the list make you want to read it more?

Owls in the Family

I can't remember if I read Owls in the Family to myself or if it was read to me, but I know that I got to know the story when I was pretty young. And ever since then, every time I see the book cover or hear someone mention the title, I get a really warm nostalgic feeling because Owls in the Family was a book that made me absurdly happy.

That is Farley Mowat's gift, really. He writes beautiful, and often hilarious, books about animals and their interactions with people and after you've read them they become part of how you think about that animal forever. Owls in the Family made me think it was totally possible to have owls as pets when I was a kid, and it made every owl hoot I've heard since seem like a chord in some nighttime symphony.

Owls are amazing in their own right, but Mowat gave them a kind of life and personality in his story that made them so much more accessible to me as a little kid.

A number of Farley Mowat's books are being released and the Globe and Mail is doing a 10-week series featuring excerpts from the different books. This week's is Owls in the Family, which you can check out here (the excerpt is from chapter 7 and it's a wonderful read).