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3.21 AVERAGE
3.21 AVERAGE
I'm not sure it resonated with me. Is this book really about a girl who 'finds her identity' by disagreeing with her fathers racist ideas (but he's not really a racist he just wanted to teach her a lesson?). It seemed important to read this, so I guess I'm glad I did.
funny
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Scout is the person I pictured she would grow up to be.
Go set a watchman
This book was unsettling. It seemed to me to have one major theme--that is "coming of age" of both Scout and our nation. If it can be viewed that way, it was a good book. The author left much interpretation up to the reader. I wonder if others saw different themes...
This book was unsettling. It seemed to me to have one major theme--that is "coming of age" of both Scout and our nation. If it can be viewed that way, it was a good book. The author left much interpretation up to the reader. I wonder if others saw different themes...
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
tense
fast-paced
challenging
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
so this book was not written as a sequel - which helps it make a lot more sense. apparently it was an original draft of to kill a mockingbird, that the publishers basically told her to rewrite. you get a lot of scenes that you didn't get in the original dash and it shows a different side of Atticus that a lot of people are not going to want to reckon with. I didn't love the overarching themes - and while I agreed with the main character and her actions - it was very hard to read this after reading to kill a mockingbird.
Review:
For Christmas, 1956, Harper Lee’s closest friends in New York, a young couple, gift her with a fully-funded fellowship year (so jealous). She works on Go Set a Watchman, a novel that takes her back to the American South and to Maycomb, her fictional small-town microcosm of the South. As her main character, Jean Louise, compares the South in the 1950’s to the 1930’s South she was raised in, Jean Louise grows increasingly panicked at the pervasive racial prejudices amongst whites.
In Go Set a Watchman, the white populace of Maycomb, quintessential Southern town of the 1950’s, fears being overrun by N.A.A.C.P, by their black neighbors, and by the Federal Government. They feel they’re about to be attacked, and their preacher quotes Isaiah, 21:6, to warn them of an incoming assault:
“Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”
Listening in church, Jean Louise re-appropriates the same language to cry out for a watchman to guide her through the justice and injustice plaguing the South. Jean Louise uses the same language for alarm to a different purpose. Her sense of right and wrong is in peril.
As Jean Louise wakes to how deeply-entrenched the social stratification rooted along racial lines is in Maycomb, her conscience marks the unfair and unjust, and she struggles with her repulsion. To the trained eye, the draft of Go Set a Watchman needs a rewrite. The novel feels cobbled together, and without any explanation, references old incidents as if assuming the reader already knows the backstory. The knowledge chiseled out in this novel, the same skeleton of characters and location, will informed Harper Lee’s draft of her next novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Like Go Set a Watchman, To Kill a Mockingbird traces Jean Louise’s loss of innocence, only twenty years earlier—in the 1930’s. The novel showcases the trial of a wrongly-accused black man Tom Robinson and the system that unfairly convicts him. Jean Louise watches her father Atticus defend Tom, evaluates evidence of Tom’s innocence, and still sees Tom convicted.
Both Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird share the same concern over an individual’s conscience. Conscience is touted as independently determined by the individual rather than ruled by the majority. To Kill a Mockingbird’s climactic trial is designed to make the reader see injustice prevailing in the Southern climate. The novel puts a lot of faith in a reader’s ability to see what is right. The reader is trusted to think with Jean Louise, independently, and recognize racism. Since its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird has entered school curriculum to instruct young minds on how to recognize injustice.
Go Set a Watchman didn’t even make it to publication before the press reported Jean Louise’s father, Atticus, is a pro-segregationist. In fact, Jean Louise seems like the only white character in Go Set a Watchman who is a desegregationist. If Go Set a Watchman can be said to have a narrative arc, it is that of Jean Louise fully engaging her sense of right and wrong, her conscience, against the prevailing attitude supporting segregation. Her uncle Jack defines conscience as:
“Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscience.”
Go Set a Watchman is a mess of scenes, but it does succeed in championing a well-developed conscience as a weapon against injustice.
The narrative that the human brain is capable of being the watchman Jean Louise craves has been around since the inception of anti-slavery in the United States. Writing in 1852, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to a similar conclusion: he must speak to his peers about the entrenched injustices they weren’t seeing:
“I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man,–far retired in the heaven of invention, and which, important to the republic of Man, have no watchman, or lover, or defender, but I.”
Emerson publically addressed anti-slavery by preaching the importance of self-reliance, of individualism, and of a man’s own conscience. He called upon men to make morally-right decisions, to think for themselves and not only of themselves.
Go Set a Watchman’s strength, like Emerson’s, lies in challenging others to have a conscience. This July, revisiting Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the Economist reports:
“Fifty years later . . . [if black America] were a separate country, it would have a worse life expectancy than Mexico, a worse homicide rate than Ivory Coast and a higher proportion of its citizens behind bars than anywhere on earth.”
“The wealth gap is much larger: the median white family in 2013 had net assets of $142,000; the median black family had a paltry $11,000.” (Source: The Economist, The fire and the fuel)
The language of Go Set a Watchman around race issues may be outdated, but as a challenge to recognize racial social stratification and desegregate, it stays relevant.
http://alysslit.com/2015/07/29/review-of-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman/
Notes:
Scout comes of age. Round II. Not well-structured. Welcomes Atticus to the human race. Another book defending individuals rights and encouraging love and understanding across all lines humans can draw between themselves.
95 - "My text for today is taken from the twenty-first chapter of Isaiah, verse six:
For thus hath the Lord said unto me,
Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.
102 - JL: "I especially liked the part where the Negroes, bless their hearts, couldn't help being inferior to the white race because their skulls are thicker and their brain-pans shallower--whatever that means--so we must all be very kind to them and not let them do anything to hurt themselves and keep them in their places."
113 - The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, "He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman," had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly."
118 - she did not know that she worshiped him.
122 - ...of a recurring story as old as time: the chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was played out again on private ground in the twilight of a civilization no wars and no peace could save.
Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.
150 - What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved? Did she see it in stark relief because she had been away from it? Had it percolated gradually through the years until now? Had it always been under her nose for her to see if she had only looked? No, not the last. What turned ordinary men into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people harden and say "nigger" when the world had never crossed their lips before?
176 - When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are communists.
179 JL imaginary defends herself to the Northerners: I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself . . . it meant anybody, not just Negroes. I was given to understand that the reverse was to be despised.
181 Blind, that's what I am. I never opened my eyes. I never thought to look into people's hearts, I looked only in their faces. Stone blind . . . Mr. Stone. Mr. Stone set a watchman in church yesterday. He should have provided me with one. I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on the hour.
181-2 I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference. I need a watchman to go forth and proclaim to them all that twenty-six years is too long to play a joke on anybody, no matter how funny it is.
245 Took it out on them, because we resented the government. - (M: Defensive in the face of Northern interference.)
246 The scholastic level of that school down the street, Atticus, couldn't be any lower and you know it. They're entitled to the same opportunities anyone else has, they're entitled to the same chance--"
264 It's bearable, Jean Louise, because you are your own person now - Jack
265 Every man's island, Jean Louise, ever man's watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.
For Christmas, 1956, Harper Lee’s closest friends in New York, a young couple, gift her with a fully-funded fellowship year (so jealous). She works on Go Set a Watchman, a novel that takes her back to the American South and to Maycomb, her fictional small-town microcosm of the South. As her main character, Jean Louise, compares the South in the 1950’s to the 1930’s South she was raised in, Jean Louise grows increasingly panicked at the pervasive racial prejudices amongst whites.
In Go Set a Watchman, the white populace of Maycomb, quintessential Southern town of the 1950’s, fears being overrun by N.A.A.C.P, by their black neighbors, and by the Federal Government. They feel they’re about to be attacked, and their preacher quotes Isaiah, 21:6, to warn them of an incoming assault:
“Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”
Listening in church, Jean Louise re-appropriates the same language to cry out for a watchman to guide her through the justice and injustice plaguing the South. Jean Louise uses the same language for alarm to a different purpose. Her sense of right and wrong is in peril.
As Jean Louise wakes to how deeply-entrenched the social stratification rooted along racial lines is in Maycomb, her conscience marks the unfair and unjust, and she struggles with her repulsion. To the trained eye, the draft of Go Set a Watchman needs a rewrite. The novel feels cobbled together, and without any explanation, references old incidents as if assuming the reader already knows the backstory. The knowledge chiseled out in this novel, the same skeleton of characters and location, will informed Harper Lee’s draft of her next novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Like Go Set a Watchman, To Kill a Mockingbird traces Jean Louise’s loss of innocence, only twenty years earlier—in the 1930’s. The novel showcases the trial of a wrongly-accused black man Tom Robinson and the system that unfairly convicts him. Jean Louise watches her father Atticus defend Tom, evaluates evidence of Tom’s innocence, and still sees Tom convicted.
Both Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird share the same concern over an individual’s conscience. Conscience is touted as independently determined by the individual rather than ruled by the majority. To Kill a Mockingbird’s climactic trial is designed to make the reader see injustice prevailing in the Southern climate. The novel puts a lot of faith in a reader’s ability to see what is right. The reader is trusted to think with Jean Louise, independently, and recognize racism. Since its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird has entered school curriculum to instruct young minds on how to recognize injustice.
Go Set a Watchman didn’t even make it to publication before the press reported Jean Louise’s father, Atticus, is a pro-segregationist. In fact, Jean Louise seems like the only white character in Go Set a Watchman who is a desegregationist. If Go Set a Watchman can be said to have a narrative arc, it is that of Jean Louise fully engaging her sense of right and wrong, her conscience, against the prevailing attitude supporting segregation. Her uncle Jack defines conscience as:
“Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscience.”
Go Set a Watchman is a mess of scenes, but it does succeed in championing a well-developed conscience as a weapon against injustice.
The narrative that the human brain is capable of being the watchman Jean Louise craves has been around since the inception of anti-slavery in the United States. Writing in 1852, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to a similar conclusion: he must speak to his peers about the entrenched injustices they weren’t seeing:
“I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man,–far retired in the heaven of invention, and which, important to the republic of Man, have no watchman, or lover, or defender, but I.”
Emerson publically addressed anti-slavery by preaching the importance of self-reliance, of individualism, and of a man’s own conscience. He called upon men to make morally-right decisions, to think for themselves and not only of themselves.
Go Set a Watchman’s strength, like Emerson’s, lies in challenging others to have a conscience. This July, revisiting Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the Economist reports:
“Fifty years later . . . [if black America] were a separate country, it would have a worse life expectancy than Mexico, a worse homicide rate than Ivory Coast and a higher proportion of its citizens behind bars than anywhere on earth.”
“The wealth gap is much larger: the median white family in 2013 had net assets of $142,000; the median black family had a paltry $11,000.” (Source: The Economist, The fire and the fuel)
The language of Go Set a Watchman around race issues may be outdated, but as a challenge to recognize racial social stratification and desegregate, it stays relevant.
http://alysslit.com/2015/07/29/review-of-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman/
Notes:
Scout comes of age. Round II. Not well-structured. Welcomes Atticus to the human race. Another book defending individuals rights and encouraging love and understanding across all lines humans can draw between themselves.
95 - "My text for today is taken from the twenty-first chapter of Isaiah, verse six:
For thus hath the Lord said unto me,
Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.
102 - JL: "I especially liked the part where the Negroes, bless their hearts, couldn't help being inferior to the white race because their skulls are thicker and their brain-pans shallower--whatever that means--so we must all be very kind to them and not let them do anything to hurt themselves and keep them in their places."
113 - The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, "He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman," had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly."
118 - she did not know that she worshiped him.
122 - ...of a recurring story as old as time: the chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was played out again on private ground in the twilight of a civilization no wars and no peace could save.
Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.
150 - What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved? Did she see it in stark relief because she had been away from it? Had it percolated gradually through the years until now? Had it always been under her nose for her to see if she had only looked? No, not the last. What turned ordinary men into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people harden and say "nigger" when the world had never crossed their lips before?
176 - When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are communists.
179 JL imaginary defends herself to the Northerners: I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself . . . it meant anybody, not just Negroes. I was given to understand that the reverse was to be despised.
181 Blind, that's what I am. I never opened my eyes. I never thought to look into people's hearts, I looked only in their faces. Stone blind . . . Mr. Stone. Mr. Stone set a watchman in church yesterday. He should have provided me with one. I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on the hour.
181-2 I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference. I need a watchman to go forth and proclaim to them all that twenty-six years is too long to play a joke on anybody, no matter how funny it is.
245 Took it out on them, because we resented the government. - (M: Defensive in the face of Northern interference.)
246 The scholastic level of that school down the street, Atticus, couldn't be any lower and you know it. They're entitled to the same opportunities anyone else has, they're entitled to the same chance--"
264 It's bearable, Jean Louise, because you are your own person now - Jack
265 Every man's island, Jean Louise, ever man's watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.
After reading and loving To Kill A Mockingbird, I was hesitant to read this one. This was written in the perspective of Jean Louise as an adult. I will say that parts were difficult to read, but I likes that characters were now viewed from hed adult perspective.
Atticus was no longer a saint in his daughters eyes, but in his way he raised her to be better than himself. I liked the combination of some childhood memories and other things that happened as the children grew up.
Overall, the book will never be as great as the first, but it was worth the read.
Atticus was no longer a saint in his daughters eyes, but in his way he raised her to be better than himself. I liked the combination of some childhood memories and other things that happened as the children grew up.
Overall, the book will never be as great as the first, but it was worth the read.