Alone in Berlin - Hans Fallada
Room - Emma Donaghue
Looking for Alaska - John Green
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
The Shack - William P. Young
Bridge of Clay - Markus Zusak
The Sherlock Holmes Collection - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1984 - George Orwell
And probably more that I’ve forgotten.
Maybe To Kill a Mockingbird again, ‘cause it’s been 2 years.
Frigging A-Levels and their life-sucking free-time commitments.
Actually, I haven’t seen in it months.
It’s been read by 3 people, so it’s quite worn out and well-read-looking. Creased spine, dodgy pages, etc.
…yes, I miss a book. An inanimate object, I know. Shut up.
She’s one of the most infamous authors of all time. Her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the biggest influences on my adolescent life. And although the morals of Atticus have taught me lessons of reality, fairness, equality, the evils of prejudice and the sense of true beauty that I have elsewhere been unable to encounter, it’s the method of Lee’s own life that speaks to me most.
She lives alone, in a small town, synonymous with Mockingbird’s Maycomb County. She has no husband or child, but seems to find company in her cats. Her neighbours see her rarely – maybe a few times a week, buying a pint of milk, a loaf of bread. She keeps to herself, you know? Sure, she’s famous as heck, but she’s private: a virtue so rare these days, it’s effectively endangered. Lee: a living Boo Radley. It’s her persistence against the ways of the world that confuses her fans so much: why would a woman with such positive influence on the morals of decades’ worth of generations shy away from the wave of gratefulness and attention that washes over her?
In a society where Political Correctness has been blown to the insane boundaries of the physical possibilities, and expressing yourself without accidentally opening a can of worms, free to roam into each and every area of human depression and debate, is impossible, it’s the reclusive life of Harper Lee that attracts me. Tucking yourself away, under the radar, out of the reach of the grabbing hands of hate. Just letting it all wash over you. Free from the humiliation and embarrassment of opinion, freedom.
Take Boo Radley. A monster? The works of pure evil? A psycho? Schizophrenic? Or just Arthur, helping from the sidelines. He didn’t want any recognition for himself – his main order was to secure the safety and happiness of his two young neighbours. Lee paints a beautiful picture of the misconceptions of the world – how easy it is to point, blame, judge. But is it fair for him to have to hide? Is it fair for Harper Lee to recluse? No. None of it’s fair, but that’s the life we’ve paved for ourselves, where, to avoid prejudice, pain, and misapprehension, we must remove our character from our personality, our beliefs from our speech – any mistake caused in our own personal development can never be exposed, or it will be tattooed to the body of our own entirety. Lee herself, at the Alabama Academy of Honour stated, “It’s better to be silent than to be a fool.”
It’s sad, but it seems that the only life we can honestly create for ourselves is one where we fulfil our roles and tasks in silence, privacy, humility, without the fear of being broken by the weight of the race for perfection in our species. Harper Lee has it nailed. Be thankful for what we have, help how we can, how we’re supposed to, and leave it at that. “You can’t win it if you’re not in it,” – the motto of the National Lottery. “You can’t feel the degradation, if you don’t put yourself out there.”
