What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Harper Lee

I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in high school, but didn't remember most of it. When Harper Lee passed away, I figured it was time to revisit the book in memoriam of her.

Interesting, by the way, for an author whose book prominently featured a social recluse to be a social recluse herself.

The main thing I found myself focusing on while reading this book, like when I read Anna Karenina, was what the book is about. When you hear about "To Kill a Mockingbird," the primary discussion is about race, with particular attention paid to Tom Robinson's trial. For those who have not read it: The book is set in Alabama in the 1930s, and Tom Robinson is a crippled black man who was accused of raping a white woman. It goes to court and Atticus Finch becomes one of the most famous lawyers in literary history by defending him and asserting the charges are a lie.

Seriously--I just Googled "most famous literary lawyers," and the first result was titled "The 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers (Who Are Not Atticus Finch)."

That being said, I kept expecting the trial to come up sooner. The first time I see it being alluded to is on page 74 (out of 281), and the entire episode comes to an end on page 241. That's 114 pages without Tom Robinson's case in it, and that's two-fifths of the book. How can that be the focus of the plot as a whole?

Instead, Arthur "Boo" Radley caught my eye. His pages are fewer, but are bunched up mostly at the beginning and end of the book. Boo is prevalent on pages 3-72 and again on pages 263-279, a total of 85 pages, half what Tom Robinson got. So why did he stick out? He got prime real estate: the beginning and end.

Boo is the social recluse I mentioned earlier; a man who no one ever sees, though they know he's still alive because they haven't seen his corpse being taken away. He is an object of fascination for the children, Scout, Jem, and Dill.

There are also portions of the book dedicated to an old woman with a morphine addiction who is grumpy and mean as can be, Hitler, the education system, a mad dog, poor white people, the supposed importance of having an old family and sketches of many other people in town.

The running thread I found, framed by Boo, is prejudice and hypocrisy. It is not just racism; it's bigger than that.

Toward the end of the book, Scout, the narrator, begins questioning why people treat each other the way they do. Hitler is the biggest example; she wonders why people look down on black people yet despise Hitler for looking down on the Jews.

In short, this seems to be a book people are striving to live by today. Its philosophy of being polite and honest to everybody, no matter what, is the epitome of contemporary virtue.