To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Read and reviewed in February, 2015, keeping for my personal collection

I rarely buy a new book, but I bought this one at Books-a-Million yesterday, Monday Feb. 16. I also pre-ordered Go Set a Watchman, the recently discovered manuscript by the same author, Harper Lee.
I thought I had read it years ago, but I didn't remember anything as I read it this time. I have seen the movie, so I recognized the characters and some of the plot from that. I don't know how I missed reading it, but apparently I did. So, I am all the more grateful that I decided to buy this one now.
A wonderful book of childhood in small town 1930s America.
Brother and sister Jem and Scout Finch live what seems an idyllic life with their widowed attorney father and their maid/housekeeper/surrogate mother until the summer that their father takes on a very controversial trial, defending an innocent African American man against all odds.
Other characters featured in this story are the children's friend Dill who comes every summer to visit his aunt, the Finches next door neighbor, and Boo Radley,
their reclusive, possibly mentally challenged neighbor down the block.
This is a classic in American literature, required reading for most high schools and many lower grades as well. (I graduated not many years after it was first published, so it hadn't yet made the required reading list in my time.) Its reputation is well deserved; it is wonderfully written, and the characters are drawn with precision. A delightful book, it kept me interested from beginning to end. I am looking forward to Go Set a Watchman, which is to feature Scout as a young woman.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Book image courtesy of Google Books

Read and reviewed in December, 2007. Released January, 2008.

Complex family relationships, father/son conflict, childhood betrayal, guilt, political uprising, love, marriage and infertility - and I'm only halfway through! I didn't think I'd like this book; the subject matter didn't look appealing, but it has gotten so many positive reviews and I heard the movie discussed on NPR. Now I'm glad I asked time-traveler for it. It's very well written, and hard to put down.


Fascinating book! An intimate coming-of-age story of two boys in pre-war Afghanistan. One wronged the other and later, as an adult, tried to atone for his past, and embarked on an epic-style quest, all against the background of social and political upheaval: a coup, the Russian-Afghanistan war, the rising of the Taliban, and the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. These news-worthy events were minor to the plot of the story, though. Central to the plot were racial and class differences between the Pashtuns and the Hazaras, very similar to that between American whites and blacks before the Civil Rights victories of the late 1960s and 1970s.


Here are some interesting quotes from the book:
These seemed ironic, as if he were really talking about The Kite Runner:
"Sad stories make good books."

"I finished my first novel, a father-son story set in Kabul ..."

These emphasize that people the world over are more alike than different:
"Take two Afghans who've never met, put them in a room for ten minutes, and they'll figure out how they're related."

"You can take Afghans out of Paghman, but you can't take Paghman out of Afghans."