Do you enjoy reading aloud?

When it comes to driving a car, I refuse to have my husband as a passenger. Even when I've gone to pick him up from somewhere, I prefer to slip across to the passenger's seat and let him get behind the wheel. He's just better at it than I am. He has a perfect sense of direction and finely-tuned reflexes. But most of all, when I drive he clutches the sides of his seat and looks agitated, making digs about how bad I am. He's simply the best person for the job. In the same way, when it comes to reading stories out loud, I believe I'm the best person for the job.

When we first got married, we headed off on a holiday with a trilogy of novels to read together. We'd intended to take turns reading, but it quickly became clear that he wasn't the right person to do it. He was too erratic, often pausing to figure out words he felt tough to get his tongue around. Sometimes, he was so busy just trying to read sentences out loud that he had to pause to glance over them again for their sense of meaning which interrupted the flow. It didn't take long for him to decide that as I enjoy reading out loud, I could do it permanently. I was happy with the deal, as I'd been reading out loud since I was very small, to any captive audience. It was most often my mum.

Since then, I've had years of opportunities, as I've been homeschooling our three kids. To be honest, I'm not keen on being on the other side of the book and listening. I like to have control. I can choose the right inflections to use in different characters' voices and use accents if possible. I get to utilise dramatic pauses at moments I choose, and emphasise whatever I want to, whether or not it's written in italics. I have some degree of control over how I want my listeners to feel about the characters, as it all comes out in the delivery. I love to be the person who knows what's coming, to anticipate the surprise on my listeners' faces, the gasps of shock or bursts of laughter. Not least, I appreciate it when one of the kids comes to me holding the book, saying, 'It's time to hear another chapter.'

This hobby isn't everyone's cup of tea. I had to smile as I thought of three famous novels in which an unwilling young character is coerced (or forced) into reading out loud to an antagonistic elderly person.

1) Little Women. Jo is a hired companion to rich, crabby old Aunt March (who is actually her great aunt). It's a hassle for poor Jo to be pinned down to a seat, reading the dry old books Aunt March wants to hear. The main thing which helps her bear it is that she can duck into the library to find a book of her own choice for silent reading when the old dame nods off.

2) The Book Thief. Young Liesel Meminger manages to soothe the angst and panic of the neighbours on her street, as they huddle in the bomb shelter, dreading what might happen suddenly. She considers herself to be handing out words, but doesn't expect mean old Frau Holtzapfel, who spits on their door, to come knocking, asking for Liesel to come and keep reading to her in the privacy of her own home. To Liesel's dismay, her mama, Rosa Hubermann, agrees, as Frau Holtzapfel promises to stop the spitting, and to hand over her coffee ration in return.

3) To Kill a Mockingbird. Jem Finch is ordered by his father, Atticus, to read to bedridden, nasty old Mrs Dubose. There is no way he can wriggle out of it, as it's ostensibly his punishment for losing his cool and going berserk in her garden. Even though she behaves very strangely during the reading sessions, not until later does Jem discover the real reason for her request. I'm sure his reading probably did help distract her.

Even though these three situations appear less than ideal on the surface, they show the power inherent in reading out loud, evident in the creation of truces and ties which weren't there in the first place. The power of a good story breaks down walls and barriers between people who, on the surface, are very different. The act of a reader and listener sharing an author's intentions and inspiration is an excellent way to promote good feeling between them, even when it wasn't there to start with. And I'm sure Jo, Liesel and Jem would all look back on those reluctant sessions with nostalgia. Jem's little sister, Scout, who went along for moral support, certainly did.

So I like to be the reader, and my husband and children prefer to be listeners. When it comes to reading aloud, which end of the book do you like to find yourselves?

Paula Vince is a South Australian author of contemporary, inspirational fiction. She lives in the beautiful Adelaide Hills, with its four distinct seasons, and loves to use her environment as settings for her stories. Her novel, 'Picking up the Pieces' won the religious fiction section of the International Book Awards in 2011, and 'Best Forgotten' was winner of the CALEB prize the same year. She is also one of the four authors of 'The Greenfield Legacy', Australia's first and only collaborated Christian novel. Her most recent novel, 'Imogen's Chance' was published April 2014. For more of Paula's reflections, you may like to visit her book review blog, The Vince Review.

Go Set a Watchman - review

Blurb

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch—"Scout"—returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past—a journey that can only be guided by one's own conscience.

My review

After re-reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ before reading this newly published novel by Harper Lee, I was intrigued to see how the older Jean Louise Finch (Scout) would be portrayed in Go Set a Watchman. From very early in my reading I had mixed feelings. I was sad to see that Scout’s brother, Jem, and their nanny, Calpurnia, were not going to be in the story, except in Scout’s memories of her childhood. While the adult Scout is as fiery and determined as I expected her to be, what she faces in her hometown when she goes back to visit her family, overwhelms her and is definitely not what I would have expected to be reading. I felt that much of the novel was in fact a back story. The events and interactions in Go Set a Watchman take place over a few days, dispersed between the recounting of many of Scout’s memories of the past and her reflections on the changes she now sees and experiences in her childhood hometown. Most of the memories make up the story in To Kill a Mockingbird, where they are ‘shown, not told’, as a modern editor might say, and where the impact of Scout’s life as a child is so moving and so engaging for the reader. The comparison made the new novel less engaging for me.

The adult Scout is of an age when a lot of readers would be looking for the romance in her life and there are moments where a love relationship seems to be blossoming. However, I doubt it would be satisfying to those who are drawn to that aspect of a young woman's story.

It helped me understand my own mixed feelings when I read a little more of the history of the writing of Go Set a Watchman. Though the book has been characterized in the media as a sequel to Lee's best-selling novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960, Go Set a Watchman is actually Mockingbird's first draft. The novel was originally finished in 1957, and purchased by the J.B. Lippincott Company. Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, was impressed with elements of the story, saying that "the spark of the true writer flashed in every line," but thought it was by no means ready for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel." As Jonathan Mahler recounts in his Times article on Hohoff, she thought the strongest aspect of Lee's novel was the flashback sequences featuring a young Scout, and thus requested that Lee use those flashbacks as a basis for a new novel. Lee agreed, and over the next couple of years, and various drafts, the novel achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird".

For me this explained the long sections of prose in Go Set a Watchman, which focus on the history of Southern American towns and the issue of race and discrimination. While these were interesting and often disturbing issues and facts, I found much of the writing to be journalistic in style, rather than what I would expect in a novel.

However, Scout’s changing perceptions as she comes to terms with the reality (both personal and political) which she faces in Maycomb, Alabama, after spending years in New York, is very moving, and also shocking. I think if this had been published in the 1950s when it was written, there may have been a public outcry in the Southern states of America. And certainly if it had been published after To Kill a Mockingbird, I believe it would have caused much disillusionment in readers who were inspired by that award winning novel.

Scout’s interactions with her uncle and her father, Atticus, were the most poignant aspect of Go Set a Watchman for me. One of the most impactful statements Scout makes in reflecting on the Negro population, is “How they’re as good as they are now is a mystery to me, after a hundred years of systematic denial that they’re human. I wonder what kind of miracle we would work with a week’s decency.”

The passion with which Scout deplores discrimination against Negroes, likely says a great deal about Harper Lee as a person. The title she chose for the book comes from Isaiah 21:6, “For thus has the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman. Let him declare what he sees.” As one commentator has said, this alludes to Scout's perception of her father as the moral compass or watchman of Maycomb, and her disillusionment as she realises the extent of the bigotry in her home community.

I’m rather loathe to include others' comments about Go Set a Watchman in my review but as my own feelings were so mixed, I’ve included a few.

Entertainment Weekly panned the book as "a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird" and said "Though Watchman has a few stunning passages, it reads, for the most part, like a sluggishly-paced first draft, replete with incongruities, bad dialogue, and underdeveloped characters". “Ponderous and lurching,” wrote William Giraldi in The New Republic, "haltingly confected, the novel plods along in search of a plot, tranquilizes you with vast fallow patches, with deadening dead zones, with onslaughts of cliché and dialogue made of pamphleteering monologue or else eye-rolling chitchat." In The Spectator, Phillip Hensher called Go Set a Watchman "an interesting document and a pretty bad novel."

Alternatively, Amazon (where the novel is available for purchase) says, “Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precision—a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an American classic.”

I guess there will be many different opinions of this novel. I'm glad I've read it for myself, but I am very interested to see some opinions from our own readers and authors.

Carol Preston

Carol writes historical novels based on her family ancestry in Australia from the First Fleet. They include the Turning the Tide series; Mary’s Guardian, Charlotte’s Angel, Tangled Secrets and Truly Free. Her earlier novels Suzannah’s Gold and Rebecca’s Dream have been re-released by EBP. Her new novel, Next of Kin, was released by Rhiza Press in May this year. You can see more about Carol and her novels on her website.  

www.carolpreston.com.au

www.amazon.com/author/carolpreston

www.facebook.com/writingtoreach

Is One Enough?

I have just downloaded Harper Lee’s 'Go Set a Watchman', which I’ll review in my next blog, but in order to prepare myself to do so, I decided to go back and reread To Kill a Mockingbird. I also watched the movie. It's a great story and I enjoyed it both on screen and in the book, though I suspect the manuscript might have been given another edit by today’s editors. I felt there was quite a bit of extraneous detail which slowed the story a little for me. It’s years since I originally read it and I’m probably more critical now, and I do read with one part of my brain analysing the writing style and trying to learn from it. I wonder how modern readers would react to it if it was published today. I’m guessing most of you authors will have read it and I would love to know what you thought.

However, I’m even more fascinated by Harper Lee’s story and so have done a little research about her as a person, and as a writer. Nelle Harper Lee was born in April, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. Her father was a lawyer who served in the Alabama state legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate, Truman Capote, who would also become a writer. For most of her life, Lee’s mother suffered from mental illness, rarely leaving the house. It is believed she might have had bi-polar disorder. 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). 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. After writing several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month, 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. (It's not hard to see how her early life influenced the story). 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 Journal. Ms Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature in 2007. After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied her friend, Capote, to Kansas, to assist him in researching his bestselling book, In Cold Blood. Since publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee has granted very few requests for interviews or public appearances.

Her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, was released this month, but the build up to it has been big news for a few months. When I think about the excitement around this novel, it raises some questions for me. Why did she not write again after so much success? Why do some writers, some books, get so much attention even after such a long break? I think To Kill a Mockingbird is a great story and I’m looking forward to reading Go Set a Watchman, but why is it a best seller before it even hits the bookshops? Perhaps I ought to keep it to myself but I don’t think I’m the only reader who fails to finish reading some books by authors who have won prizes, even sold millions? Case in point; I’ve tried reading Tim Winton’s books and find I usually give up after a few chapters. I’m not engaged, nor captivated by the writing style, which suggests I am probably a philistine when it comes to literary fiction, but I do find myself concluding that once a person has a success in writing, or begins by being a celebrity, they can write pretty much anything at all and will sell millions. It will be very interesting to hear about reactions to Go Set a Watchman.

Does all this discourage me as a writer? No. Does it make me want to continue to learn more about the art of writing? Yes. Does it make me question why I write? Yes.

Are we writers because we cannot stop writing? Because we keep dreaming of the day our novels will win prizes, sell millions, make us a celebrity? Because the satisfaction of completing a writing project is so great? Because some people, perhaps only a few, enjoy our stories, and encourage us to go on writing. Because we believe that some people – again perhaps only a few – will be inspired or challenged by our stories? Or perhaps our writing is not about us at all, but about what God wants to do through our writing when He calls us to follow His lead.

I didn’t start writing until I was in my fifties. I had no illusions about being world famous. I was just thrilled to have the experience of writing something I felt passionate about, completing the project and seeing it in print. I felt that God had not so much called me to write as invited me to use something I loved to reach out to others and hopefully draw them to thinking about their relationship with Him. It was a bonus to have readers who enjoyed my stories and were challenged by them. So I’ve continued to write, enjoyed the journey, been grateful to those who’ve helped; editors, publisher, readers. I can’t imagine having stopped after one, and would love to know why Harper Lee did. Does anyone know or have theories? Writing is a fascinating art, and the journeys, motivations and ambitions of writers equally interesting. I wonder if Harper Lee’s story provokes some reflection for you.  

Carol Preston   

Carol writes historical novels based on her family ancestry in Australia from the First Fleet. They include the Turning the Tide series; Mary’s Guardian, Charlotte’s Angel, Tangled Secrets and Truly Free. Her earlier novels Suzannah’s Gold and Rebecca’s Dream have been re-released by EBP. Her new novel, Next of Kin, was released by Rhiza Press in May this year. You can see more about Carol and her novels on her website.  

www.carolpreston.com.au

www.amazon.com/author/carolpreston

www.facebook.com/writingtoreach