Word of the Day
Recrudesce (v., reh-CREW-dess)
To re-begin, to pick up again after a period of time off. It's good when it's a website; it's bad when it's a virus.
Gif of the Day
Link of the Day
Go Set a Watchman - Harper Lee
Hi there! On our recent trip, we listened to Harper Lee's recently unearthed novel, Go Set a Watchman. It's sort of a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee's seminal (and only) published novel and American classic—but it was written before Mockingbird, so perhaps it's a prequel? Once Lee submitted it to a publisher, it was returned, rejected, but Lee was told to write an earlier story about the same characters. That story was the classic book every freshman in high school reads today.
So Go Set a Watchman is good, right? Well...yes and no. It's a good novel, though not quite a great one. It's very much a first novel, full of terrific observations, quips, and foreshadowing, but also with a threadbare plot and a tendency to have characters speechify instead of dialogue. It lacks the polish that To Kill a Mockingbird has.
It also has more moral queasiness. Atticus Finch is a racist in this novel, and a now-adult Scout's difficulties of dealing with this fact mirror our own. This is a coming-of-age novel, but one with mid-20s characters instead of elementary school ones. The gut-punch is harder because we know these characters already—or do we? To me, it's best to read these as two separate books with two separate sets of identically named characters. It's much easier to deal with the characters' inconsistencies with this lens than trying to keep things perfectly aligned. (Also, this is a pretty blatant and awful money grab, and Lee never wished the novel to come out herself, so...make of that what you will.)
But it's the flaws and oddities that make Go Set a Watchman well worth a read or listen. It's not sublime like Lee's other novel, and that's what makes them interesting companions. We can see Lee's improvement, and we can wrestle with the adult themes from an adult lens in Watchman. It won't be comfortable but it will be worthwhile. Go read this book.
LiteratureHarper LeeComing of ageGo Set a WatchmanTo Kill a MockingbirdPresequelsLove who you will, but marry your own kindCash grabs