I first remember reading Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird in high school, when the challenges of my own youth were foremost in my mind at all times. It was a book that I immediately connected with mainly because of the precocious narrator––a figure with characteristics I often recognized (then and now) in myself.
The story follows Scout Finch, a young girl living in a small Southern town during the Great Depression. Scout and her brother Jem navigate childhood adventures with their friend Dill, while their widowed father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer who takes on a controversial case, defending a black man wrongly accused. Through Scout's eyes, we witness the trial, the complexities of justice, and the importance of empathy in a world dealing with racism and social inequality.
I thoroughly enjoyed the re-reading challenge because it took me out of my comfort zone: I’m not typically a person who picks up the same book twice. But in revisiting Lee’s absorbing work, which I hadn’t read since high school, I discovered nuances in the text that I hadn’t caught as a younger person. This gave me a completely new understanding of the story that, ultimately, made me love it even more as an adult. Something else I rarely do as an adult reader is make markings in books (I feel like books are too sacred and lovely to spoil with my scribblings). But in opening the same 23-year-old copy of Mockingbird, I noticed that I had, in fact, left written notes in the margins as a teenager––further proving that it must have made a major impression on me at the time for me to physically engage with the text.
This challenge opened my eyes and afforded me a new sense of discovery to not only a classic work, but to my reading habits and how they (and myself) have changed over time. I look forward to tackling a re-read of another favorite book.
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