In Memory: Harper Lee, 89

It's been a difficult week for me. I usually read a book or more per day, but I'm currently struggling to get through a book I requested through NetGalley. My typing, which is normally quite speedy, has been slower and filled with more typos.

It's tough getting older.

By now, you're probably wondering what this has to do with Miss Harper Lee. Well, you see, it's like this . . .

Would it surprise you to find out that I never read To Kill a Mockingbird until last year?

Yeah, it's true. Out of the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of books I've read in my life, I never read the book that appears to be the most beloved of modern classic American literature. It wasn't yet required reading when I was in high school or college, so I missed it there. By the time it was required reading in schools across the country, the hype surrounding the book was so immense that I avoided it just on the basis of hype.

You see, I'd been burned by hype before. If a book, movie, TV show, or song gets a lot of "you've got to read/see/hear this" attention, it's like something in me just wants to ignore it. I want to judge each book (movie/TV show/song) on its own merits and not the opinion of someone else. With the Internet having information so freely available, it's hard at times to separate from the noise of opinion long enough to form one of your own.

"But it won the Pulitzer Prize!" I hear you exclaiming. After checking out a list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it appears I've read seven Pulitzer Prize-winning novels in my life, five of which I didn't realize had won the prestigious award. But back to my story . . .

When it was announced that a sequel to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was going to be published, I admit I was curious. I had heard the stories surrounding her view that she said everything she had to say with Mockingbird. Then it was revealed that Go Set a Watchman was actually an earlier draft of the classic. My interest was piqued even more. I'm one of those people who watch all the extra features on DVDs, so I prepared myself to read the books. I reserved both of them from my local library with the intent of reading Mockingbird first and then Watchman.

I received Go Set a Watchman first, but I set it aside, hoping that To Kill a Mockingbird would come to me before Watchman had to be returned. It did, and I began reading the book I had passed over for so many years.

And I loved it.

There, I said it. I loved it. In my opinion, To Kill a Mockingbird deserves its place in American literary history. And I enjoyed Go Set a Watchman as well. Even though Watchman is clearly an earlier draft -- some passages were used in their entirety in Mockingbird and there are several other instances where the books do not align -- it also works as a sequel of sorts, one where the remembrances of childhood are tempered by the realities of adulthood.

I imagine the attention garnered with the release of To Kill a Mockingbird and the subsequent movie was hard on the intensely private author. By all accounts, Harper Lee was a warm and witty individual. She loved being with people but also valued her privacy. Did this play into her decision to not write another novel? I don't know. Maybe, as she said, it was enough to "say everything I had to say" with the one novel.

(It's funny how I keep referencing Mockingbird as Lee's lone novel but acknowledge having read Watchman. It's possible I'm being influenced by published comments stating that Miss Lee never intended for Go Set a Watchman to be published.)

It would have been a wonderful world, I believe, to have had more published novels from the pen of Harper Lee. The reality, however, is that she left a thought-provoking work that -- more than fifty years after its original publication -- still shines a light on a period of American history that is both nostalgic and an indictment of man's cruelty to man.

Harper Lee, you will be missed.