Book Review: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

So many people have asked me for my take on Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman: A Novel that I figured I'd just write about it.

The short version:  I really, really enjoyed it. I started it almost as soon as it arrived Tuesday a week ago and finished it about 48 hours later.

The long version:  To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite book. Ever. When that is where the bar is set, everything else falls short of it. GSW is not TKM. But, it's a story that helped me feel satisfied, for the most part, about how characters turned out (GSW is set about 20 years after TKM in the 1950s). The best part about getting to revisit some of American literature's most memorable characters is that we get to see what tomboyish, precocious Scout is like as an adult. The best parts about her haven't changed. She's still sassy and she's still thinking for herself.

Scout's heart is still the same, but when she returns home for a long visit to Maycomb, Alabama, from New York City, she's aghast that it's not the same place she remembers from growing up there (Thomas Wolfe, anyone?). That's something I can relate to. After almost three decades in one county in North Carolina, I relocated to suburban Atlanta. My visits back were often at first, but since the first couple of years, the time between visits has increased. Now I go back once or twice a year. Something amazes me each time. Downtown Raleigh has become a place with great restaurants and other places to go after work and on the weekends instead of the ghost town it was after 5:00 15 years ago. The nearby town where I went to elementary, middle and high school has changed dramatically. Young families actually move there from Raleigh because it's a great place that's tripled in population size since I was in high school. I could go on.

What some readers and critics have focused on is the difference we see in Atticus, who is, in GSW an elderly man who has passed the torch on to another, younger lawyer but still shows up to his law firm most days. He's still a pillar in the community. Just as Scout sneaked up to the courthouse balcony to watch her father defend Tom Robinson, she finds her same spot one afternoon to see where all the men in town have gone. As it turns out, it's a meeting that has a pro-segregation bent to it.

Don't many of us have an idealized notion of who are parents are and what they stand for when we're kids? At some point, for most of us, that changes. Suddenly, we find out that our parents are real people. And most of the time, real people are complicated. Discovering who are parents actually are as people is a big part of what it means to grow up.

Seeing Scout as a grown up is my favorite thing about GSW.      

It's Monday. What are you reading?

 

This event is hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. Go check out her blog.

I'm currently enjoying Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. It's been patiently waiting on my shelf for me to pick it up ever since I visited the Old Kentucky Home on a trip to Asheville several years ago. It will definitely take me the rest of the week to finish it. 

 

 

Up next on my to-read list are The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick, A History of Food in 100 Recipes by William Sitwell (for future book review) and Elaine Neil Orr's A Different Sun (also for future book review).

Also, I'm still currently listening to The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Migration by Isabel Wilkerson in the car. 

What are you reading?

Recent Read: Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics

Over Christmas I got in a little extra reading time and got to read a book I'd been looking forward to: Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics by Jeremy Schaap. I enjoy reading athletes' stories but didn't know much about Owens' accomplishments. Also, I didn't learn anything about the 1936 Berlin Olympics when I visited the city (but I learned plenty about other things) and was curious. Not only did I get what I needed to know about Owens and Hitler's manipulation of and propaganda for these Olympic games, several other things I've recently read also popped up here.

American Ambassador to Germany William Dodd got box seats during the Berlin Olympics to watch Owens run. (In 2012 I read In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, an account of Dodd's time with his family in Berlin between the World Wars.) Author Thomas Wolfe sat with him in his box watching Owens win his three gold medals in three events (I visited Wolfe's Asheville home a few years ago and have just moved You Can't Go Home Again closer to the top of my reading stack). Also, there was mention of the eugenics programs in effect while Hitler was in power. Unfortunately, the same practices were also happening in some states in America, and exploring the program and its practice in North Carolina after World War II (when many states put an end to these programs) was something I spent a lot of time studying, contemplating and writing about in graduate school. 

Recent Read: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

I've just finished reading a book on Berlin I've been wanting to read forever: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson (you can see my German reading lists here and here). I've been a fan of Larson ever since I visited Chicago for the first time and read his Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. I still have to say that I think his book about Chicago is a bit more compelling, but Garden of Beasts still fascinated me due to my recent visit to Berlin. I could picture some of the places he mentions which is always fun.

From the title of the book I thought the main characters would be William Dodd, American ambassador to Germany, his wife Mattie and their adult children Martha and Bill. Perhaps the more interesting of the foursome were William and daughter Martha, and most of the book centered around the two of them. William had the impossible task of being American liaison and diplomat starting in 1933 in Germany and ending in 1940. He was overworked and underpaid, had difficulty with German government officials and experienced a host of other problems. Besides the work he did while there, his socialite daughter's love life and infatuation with communism is explored (I thought this part was very interesting).

I love when something I read in one book coincides with something I've read previously. There were several such occurrences during this read. First, before departing Chicago for Berlin with her family, Martha had an affair with author Carl Sandburg whose home I visited in Flat Rock, North Carolina, a couple of years ago. Sandburg was later a pallbearer at William's funeral. In chapter seven, Larson says that on William's first day as American ambassador, a new law took effect, "the Law for Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps." We learned about this is at the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin, and particularly disturbing was the medical experimentation performed on children with disabilities, since they were deemed "unfit" to have families of their own one day. Unfortunately, government-mandated sterilization happened in the early and middle parts of the 20th century in the United States as well. In graduate school for a gender and medicine elective I studied forced and coerced hysterectomies primarily in North Carolina. Today, a state-run foundation in North Carolina is waiting for government funding to award reparations to living victims and their families (here's a recent article from Raleigh's CBS affiliate, WRAL). Martha also had an affair with author Thomas Wolfe when he was visiting Berlin (another North Carolina connection. I visited Wolfe's house a few years ago on the same trip as Sandburg's Connemara).

Martha and a friend were invited on a weekend getaway with one of the few authors who did not leave Germany during Hitler's regime, Hans Fallada, who wrote Alone in Berlin, which I absolutely loved. In chapter 40, Larson says,

"In the months following Hitler's ascension to chancellor, the German writers who were not outright Nazis had quickly divided into two camps - those who believed it was immoral to remain in Germany and those who felt the best strategy was to stay put, recede as much as possible from the world, and wait for the collapse of the Hitler regime. The latter approach became known as 'inner emigration,' and was the path Fallada had chosen."

Finally, in the Sources and Acknowledgements section, Larson mentions that he relied heavily on Christopher Isherwood's books in writing Garden of Beasts (I recently read The Berlin Stories after returning from Germany).

I really enjoyed Garden of Beasts and would recommend it for anyone wanting to know more about the American presence in Berlin from 1933 to the start of World War II.

Pat Conroy's My Reading Life

For my recent four year wedding anniversary, my husband bought me a copy of Pat Conroy's My Reading Life, a book I've been looking forward to reading since I heard it was coming out some months ago. If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know he's one of my favorites. I haven't yet read everything he's written, but I'm working on it. So far all I've read have been novels and I was anxious to read Conroy's memoir, which you probably also know is one of my favorite kinds of books to read. I'm so glad I wasn't disappointed. I savored every word of this beautiful book, and spent much longer reading it than I normally spend on a 300-page book. And, when it ended I was sorry.

Conroy devoted once chapter to each book, experience and person that shaped him first as a reader, and then, as a result, shaped him as a writer. Teachers and professors made the list, a bookshop, Paris, a librarian, a book salesperson, an author (Thomas Wolfe) and a book (Gone With the Wind). Each chapter became a thank you letter to each, as he specifically showed the evidence of how he was shaped by each person, place or thing. It made me think about what has influenced my reading and writing, and that list is long.

What books and experiences have made up your reading life?

PS One of my reading buddies just informed me that Conroy will be headlining the Savannah Book Festival in February. As if I didn't want to go enough already!

Thomas Wolfe's Angel

My husband and I were passing through Hendersonville, NC, last weekend on our way back to Atlanta from a wedding in Asheville, NC. Of course I consulted by guidebook, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains before the trip to see what we could check out while we were in the area. We were in luck. The Wolfe Angel is located in Oakdale Cemetery in Hendersonville. The historical marker and the statue are pictured below:

This angel inspired the title of Thomas Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. The marble statue was imported from Italy and sold by Wolfe's father (a monument dealer) to the Johnson family for use on their family plot. It's beautiful, and is surrounded by the rest of the cemetery, which is on a beautiful piece of land.

For more information about my visit to Thomas Wolfe's mother's boarding house in Asheville last fall, click here.

Asheville

I used Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guide last week while in Asheville with my family. The book is divided into tours that work geographically. I was able to do parts of tours 8 and 9 (Weaverville and North Asheville, and Downtown and South Asheville, respectively), though a bit out of order.

The night we arrived we visited the Biltmore House for the Candlelight Tour and saw the house in all its Christmas finery. I had read ahead in my Guide to know that:

• George Vanderbilt’s library housed 24,000 volumes.
• Henry James and Edith Wharton (childhood friend of Edith Vanderbilt) had visited the house in 1905. Wharton had just published The House of Mirth. Each author is the namesake of a suite of rooms at Biltmore.

We found a monument to O. Henry’s story, “Gift of the Magi” set in bronze in a sidewalk on a street in downtown Asheville, and later we visited the Riverside Cemetery and saw O. Henry’s gravesite.


Also at Riverside Cemetery is the grave of Thomas Wolfe, and the gates of the cemetery also honor him.

My dad and I drove by the Richmond Hill Inn one morning while we were out to see the site where Georgia-born Poet Sidney Lanier camped one winter before he died in 1881. The Inn was later built on the site and the Sidney Lanier Garden was planted behind the Inn. Well, supposedly. When we arrived, the Inn was closed, but a gate was open just wide enough for us to get in to look around. I poked all around but couldn’t find the Garden. Instead, we did find this (see picture below). An arsonist set fire to one of the buildings of the Richmond Hill Inn early in 2009 and authorities have yet to solve the case. It caused $7 million in damages. You can read more about it in the Asheville Citizen-Times here.

Near the Inn is the last building that remains of Highland Hospital. Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was hospitalized here in the summer of 1936 and several other times before her death. She suffered from schizophrenia. In 1948, hospital’s main building, which housed Zelda and other patients, caught fire and Zelda died of smoke inhalation. Today what remains of the hospital is Homewood, a home on the property for the hospital’s main physician, Robert Carroll. It’s now a special events facility.

In 1936 while Zelda was at Highland Hospital, Scott lived at The Grove Park Inn. He had tried to rent a space at Julia Wolfe’s boarding house, The Old Kentucky Home, but was turned away because Julia didn’t rent to alcoholics. The Grove Park still celebrates Scott’s birthday each year on September 24, though he was reportedly a difficult guest due to heavy drinking, an extramarital affair and a suicide threat during his stay.

A number of other writers have stayed at the Grove Park including Charles Frazier, Margaret Mitchell, Alex Haley and Pat Conroy.

Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains

For my birthday in November, my best friend got me a great gift, a book called, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook. Lucky for me, I'll get to use it this week as I head to Asheville with my family to celebrate my parents' 35th wedding anniversary.

Back in September, I visited the Thomas Wolfe Memorial House and Carl Sandburg's home, Connemara. There is much more in the way of literary sites still to see in the Asheville area.

Check back at the end of the week for more!

Thomas Wolfe and Pat Conroy

Much of the time I make my reading coincide with travel I’ll be doing or that I’m just back from, and movies or books about to be released. I read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice immediately after my return from Italy a few years ago. I read Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor on my trip to Savannah earlier this year and just before a trip to her farm, Andalusia. Recently, I read Devil in the White City during my trip to Chicago.

However, I’ve just recently enjoyed a serendipitous combination of two writers, a trip and a book release. It has all fit so nicely together and I didn’t even plan it!

I read Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides two summers ago. When I began hearing buzz about his latest novel, South of Broad (I’ve read numerous reviews of South of Broad and two of the magazines I subscribe to, Garden & Gun and Southern Living, have also promoted the highly anticipated novel.), I promptly got on the waiting list for it at the library (I’m currently number 142 in line – it will be a while) and started reading Beach Music which as it turns out, is the most perfectly crafted novel that I can remember reading in a very long time. Beach Music is 800 pages long. Even though I read all the time, it took me a few weeks to get through it. I was about a third of the way through when I camped over Labor Day weekend near Asheville, N.C., hometown of Thomas Wolfe. All of it fit together so nicely, and I was pleased to know that Thomas Wolfe is one of Conroy’s favorite writers. Even Jack McCall, the main character in Beach Music sings Wolfe’s praises when he says,

“Taking out Look Homeward, Angel, I read the magnificent first page and remembered when I had been a sixteen-year-old boy and those same words had set me ablaze with the sheer inhuman beauty of language as a cry for mercy, incantation, and a great river roaring through the darkness. ‘Hello, Eugene. Hello, Ben Gant,’ I said quietly, for I knew these characters as well as I knew anyone in the world. Literature was where the world made sense to me.”

I read Look Homeward, Angel about 10 years ago, but it was as though I had just read it before visiting the Old Kentucky Home, the Asheville boarding house where Tom, the youngest of eight children, was raised by his mother, Julia, a businesswoman far ahead of her time. Scenes that I remembered reading in Look Homeward, Angel came to life for me during the tour of the 29-room house (all but just a handful were bedrooms for the boarders). The tour guide did a wonderful job of telling all about Tom’s childhood there (he based much of Look Homeward, Angel on growing up in the boarding house and his college years at the University of North Carolina). The tour guide balanced stories of Tom and his family with tidbits about what life was like in a Southern boardinghouse. It was really fascinating. Photos inside were permitted, so I took full advantage both there and outside the house.

52 North Market Street, Asheville

A pair of Tom's shoes have been bronzed and are between the house and the street.

Tom's favorite place to sleep at the Old Kentucky Home, the upstairs sleeping porch.

The bed where Tom and his seven brothers and sisters were all born to Julia.

The dining room, which was heavily damaged in a fire in 1998.


I bought another of Wolfe’s famous novels, You Can’t Go Home Again, in the gift shop. I’m looking forward to reading it just as much as I’m looking forward to getting my turn with a copy of South of Broad from the library (if I bought every book I wanted to read, I’d be more than broke). I’m particularly excited to read it as Charleston, S.C. is one of my favorite places in the whole world. Here is a picture taken by me from a boat in the Charleston Harbor a few summers ago.