I read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school and cannot for the life of me remember anything about it. I think at the time I was too busy reading Jules Verne to pay any interest in the schools literature. Never had any motivation to go back and read it again, it definitely did not make any impression on me.
I was too busy watching Dragonball Z and playing Legend of Zelda to care. *looks around* Um, I wasn't much of a reader as a child. :/ It's gotten much better with age, though.
Interesting side note about TKAM: from what I heard from a retired librarian a while back, old hardcover editions of TKAM are very hard to find (this doesn't include the 50th anniversary edition), so if you see a hardcover version of this book next time you're at the bookstore, do yourself a favor and buy it (assuming you can afford it).
The Butler came out in 2013. 42 came out in 2013. Red Tails came out in 2012. Dear White People came out in 2014 (although it's about contemporary racism).
Have you read the book? No. So don't hate on it. Wait for it to release in July before you pass judgement. Harper is a fantastic writer and it wasn't "luck". Luck is EL James. Nobody is going to love and appreciate Fifty Shades of Grey in 2056. That's a fact. Harper changed the world and she will do it again.
I agree 100%. There's a reason To Kill A Mockingbird is still widely read decades after its publication. I daresay it'll still be popular come the 100th-anniversary. I can see it now: To Kill A Mocking Bird: The Centennial Edition. And the moment where I stand slacked-jawed and realize just how old I will be then. I'll be 70 by then. Good lawd... Oi! The mutton chop didn't become popular until the 1810s at the least!
look, il just fess up. I hated to to Kill A Mockingbird, OK? That's not something you force a highschool boy to read. If it weren't for that book, Silas Marner, and Catcher in the Rye, I'd probably have 10% more testosterone than I do now . Shakespeare, Wilde, 1984, Heart of Darkness, even Mice and Men, those are books you make boys read, not some story told from the POV of some annoying little girl. 16 year old boys don't give a crap about civil rights and families . Give them shipwrecked children on an island eating each other. That's what they want. I just wanted to forget about To Kill a Mockingbird , but it looks like fans and haters alike are going to have their memories spoiled with this new uneccessary cash cow.
To be honest, I never really read To Kill A Mocking Bird because I just felt it was yet another one of those force-feed-morals-into-our-idiot-children. A story where a kid learns to not be racist is cool and all, but I always felt it was too...preachy?
Yes and no. Most 16 year old boys do not want Shakespeare or Mice and Men. Give them Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Call of the Wild or 20,000 Leagues under the sea.
I'm pretty sure I read it back in high school. I can't say what I thought about it, but I remember that it wasn't really a chore, even for my high school self who had no patience for books. Even so, I think a sequel now is kind of daft. It might be a decent book, but I doubt it will live up to expectations, and I feel the ship has sailed already. Some books just don't need sequels. Still, it will earn enough money to make your head spin, just on the name alone.
The manuscript was finished many years ago but was lost and it just happened to be discovered this last fall. That's why a sequel has come so late.
All those links I posted and no one looks at them. Sigh. The manuscript was not lost. And it was actually written first, before TKAM. Harper Lee reacted poorly to fame and became a recluse. She didn't want to publish the second book. And her sister protected that request until she died. And it wasn't discovered last fall. It's been known about for years. (Maybe even since TKAM was published, I didn't look that far.) There is a huge scandal surrounding this publication because some people think Lee's senility (she's 85 and had a stroke) was exploited, sticking a contract under her nose that she then signed.
I was aware that it was written long ago, but that doesn't really change the fact that for the readers it essentially didn't exist for all this time. These types situations where something extremely famous and old gets a new installment tend to be ripe for disappointment, especially for a novel as famous as TKAM. I feel that too many people will expecting this book to light the world on fire, when it probably won't be able to live up to the expectations set by the previous book.
What does this mean, doesn't change what fact? I knew about this manuscript more than a couple years ago and the scandal about its publication. I'm pretty sure the people involved in getting it published knew about it long ago.
Here's more on the history of the second manuscript: OK, I take it back, I see where the 'just discovered' comes from: But that's not consistent with the scandal and the interview I saw more than a year ago. I'll have to keep investigating.
There's something not quite complete about the claim it was only recently found. The Vanity Fair article was from August 2013, so it's been known about at least that long. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/books/harper-lee-author-of-to-kill-a-mockingbird-is-to-publish-a-new-novel.html?_r=0 So it's been long known about but perhaps the actual copy's location was not.
That most people who hadn't looked any deeper than the physical To Kill A Mockingbird book, or people who never read the book at all honestly had no idea this draft existed. I agree with @Void , though. I imagine people are already hyping this to be the next To Kill A Mockingbird, the book that changes the world, but it could very well be a flop by comparison. @123456789 has a point, we're into zombies and dystopian apocalypse now, and after movie after movie discussing racial issues, whose to say those of us who are not already fans who will buy the thing anyway will just go, 'Oh look, yet another installment of Racial Issues™.' and not read it? Or simply, 'If it ain't action-adventure with a bonus of zombies or dystopia, I'm out.'
