Grits

lilac, that's what my english teacher is doing now in our class, and I can see the effects already. It's a shame how english class, which should teach appreciation of literature, can turn students off on books so beautiful and rich as To Kill a Mockingbird! They just milk the story to death, and focus on the wrong things. For instance, he's making this book all about racial prejudice! I can't stand it, I'm just glad I've already read it and it'll always be in my favorites.

seigfried007

Ditto Grits.

Personally, I loved the story and picked it up of my own volition as a teenager. Loved it. I'm glad no one forced me to read it. The characters were expertly realized, the prose well written. It wasn't long-winded and I dont recall anything terribly heavy that dragged on for ages (though heavy conversation sometimes follow any classic, I don't recall much of that happening during the book).

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Poor people are crazy, Jack--I'm eccentric

--Howard Payne

Remedy

I'll be perfectly honest: I hated that book. I read it because it was assigned, and it's fairly easy to understand, but Scout drove me nuts. I could not stand her; she annoyed the absolute heck out of me.

On the other hand, just about every classmate I talked to said they adored the book. To each their own and all.

JeffAdair

Surprisingly good, but then that's why it's a classic.

Malone

Atticus and Boo are probably two of the best characters in literary history. Right up there with Heathcliff, Scrooge, and Ahab. This was one of my favorite books as a kid, as well as Red Fern Grows.

I watched that Capote movie with Phillip S. Hoffman, and learned that Harper worked with Capote and wrote the book as kind of a side project. Most of the literary community at the time wrote it off as a joke and didn't take it seriously. She seemed to be Capote's anchor and did a lot of the practical stuff while they researched In Cold Blood.

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Tiamat10

To Kill a Mockingbird was one of my top two all-time favourite books that I had to read in high school (Fahrenheit 451 was the other). The only way I can describe it is: brilliant.

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“Lee Pennington has been published in more than 300 magazines—and rejected so many thousand times that in one six-month period he papered all four walls of a room with rejection slips.”

--Andre Bernard, Bill Henderson, Rotten Rejections

cryptika

To Kill a Mockingbird is my favourite book. I just reread it recently and fell even more in love with it. I have been harassing people in bars to read it. I'm glad it wasn't assigned school reading and I picked it up out of my own curiousity, but I can't imagine not loving it.

Scout is my favourite character of all the books I've ever read.