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There is never enough time to read all the books I want to read. I would need to be immortal and I still don’t think I could read them all. I am determined to spread out my reading this year, between my TBR, review books and library books…and other books that happen to be laying around, either on a shelf, table, hearth, or the ones that haven’t made it to my TBR yet. My goal is, at least, twelve. That will average one a month.
To see all my library books, enter Library in the search bar or in the categories drop down menu. Happy reading.
I quickly discovered why To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee has become a classic and won the Pulitzer Prize. I was immersed in the struggles of a lawyer, a widowed father, raising two young children, while defending a black man charged with raping a white girl.
All the darkness of the times came through the story, racism, classism, and violence in the Deep South during the 1930s. My disgust and anger brought a tear or two to my eye.
Scout, an eight year old girl had me in stitches. Her older brother, Jem, matures as the story develops.
I was smiling and laughing at their thoughts, their innocence, and their vivid imaginations.
“Maybe he died and they stuffed him up the chimney.”
The sophistication of the writing stands the test of time!
5 Stars
GOODREADS BLURB
‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’
A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel – a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man’s struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.
Genre: Classics, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Young Adult
Harper Lee, known as Nelle, was born in the Alabama town of Monroeville, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served on the state legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.
After graduating from high school in Monroeville, Lee enrolled at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery (1944-45), and then pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama (1945-50), pledging the Chi Omega sorority. While there, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, “Ramma-Jamma”. Though she did not complete the law degree, she studied for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC.
Lee continued as a reservation clerk until the late 50s, when she devoted herself to writing. She lived a frugal life, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her father.
Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month at the East 50th townhouse of her friends Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift of a year’s wages with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
Within a year, she had a first draft. Working with J. B. Lippincott & Co. editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Published July 11, 1960, the novel was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller with more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted “Best Novel of the Century” in a poll by the Library .
Books from the Backlog is a fun way to feature some of those
neglected books sitting on your bookshelf unread. If you are anything
like me, you might be surprised by some of the unread books hiding in
your stacks.
Love dogs? Love books? Love libraries? Hate Book-burning werewolves?
Once long ago the Shipsfeather Academy was a training ground for an ancient race of dog-shifters whose mission was to protect the world’s knowledge. A powerful curse sealed these librarians in the basement of their building and gave the control of the town to a pack of book-burning werewolves.
Librarian Liberty Cutter watches in horror as the town’s public library goes up in flames and plans to re-establish the library in the abandoned Shipsfeather Academy building. Chronus, the Old English Sheepdog headmaster of the academy and leader of the dog-shifters, knows he must make some changes to continue to keep his pack safe. But even if he could persuade Liberty to believe in a talking sheepdog, how far can she be trusted? And will she ever be able to care for him as a man. He has to try, because Liberty Cutter and her staff of zany librarians may hold the key to the dog-shifters’ freedom…and the future of the town.
I added Released (The Shapeshifters’ Library #1) by Amber Polo to my TBR on 2.7.13. That cover alone would have grabbed first, but after reading the blurb I would have been happy I grabbed it. Now, just gotta find time to read it. So many books get buried in my Kindle…and those stacks over there and back there…I haven’t forgotten you. 🙂 What do you think of that fantastic cover??????
