Go read a Watchman.

"Now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle to your father's. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man's heart and a man's failings."

I’m a slow reader who squeezes books in around the edges of life, so it took me about a week to read Go Set A Watchman. During that time, the reviews came flooding in. I heard everything from hate to love and all the spaces in between – a phenomenon I suspect says more about the subjectivity of taste and literary criticism than it can ever say about a single book.

As for me, I was joyfully surprised to discover I loved it. It was everything I hoped it would be but was scared it couldn’t possibly.

So here’s a very scrappy list of impressions, mashed together haphazardly because my mind just isn’t… braining.

First of all, Harper Lee can write. I know this isn’t really a surprise, but when you drop the mic and leave just one massive book bomb out in the world, there’s sort of a mysterious sense of this sudden stroke of genius, something that appeared quickly and possibly disappeared even more quickly. But even in all of its unedited glory, Watchman is a masterpiece of words. Really really. It's worth reading for its beautiful sentences alone.

But I’m also impressed at the continuity between To Kill A Mockingbird and Go Set A Watchman. (Now don’t read this as some embarrassing evidence of me somehow thinking that there’s any correlation between my baby apprenticeship in writing and Harper Lee’s absolute master craftsman status, buuut --) When I draft, my stories undergo multiple reincarnations. Characters experience complete personality changes or go extinct altogether. Events get rearranged. What I once thought made sense or was important suddenly looks ridiculous. I expected at least a little of this with GSAW. Since it was rewritten into Mockingbird, I assumed there would be a great variation between the characters and events of one book and those of the other. But Harper Lee knew her characters inside out. Their development, the way their lives pan out, and tiny nonessential but lovely links between the two texts made this first book feel very much like a sequel to the second.

I especially loved seeing Scout as a grown-up. Jean Louise Finch is exactly as the adult Scout should be: smart, fierce, funny, unconventional, and occasionally blinded by her own sense of justice and morality. She loves Maycomb and its people, but, maybe for the first time, she's beginning to see through them and it unsettles her. I love this. I love that she's experiencing a quarter-life crisis before that was even a thing.

A couple of the complaints I've seen mention that the book feels like a draft, that it could've done with more editing, and I agree to an extent. The ending felt a bit rushed and the text's tendency to switch between voices (the narrator and then Jean Louise's internal monologue) without any visual markers make it momentarily confusing in spots. I've also seen criticism that the book wasn't particularly plot-driven, but I am okay with that. Mockingbird was about a town. Watchman is about a woman.

If anything, Watchman feels more literary than Mockingbird. It's less neatly packaged, less clearly black and white, less tied up smoothly. Morality is not so clear cut. Good characters do bad things. There are choices made and opinions flaunted that made me angry when I read them. But maybe that's kind of the point.

Mockingbird's theme feels global; the theme of Watchman feels personal. Mockingbird is about race, and Watchman is, too, to an extent. But it's less of the white author speaking for black Americans thing and more of a white character hanging onto the issue of race as the point of reference forcing her to examine the morality of the people she loves. I don't know if this is better or worse, and I don't think I can speak to that.

Ultimately, though, Go Set A Watchman is about a young woman's relationship with the people who raised her, about maturing as an adult and finding her own feet. I think it's incredibly relatable. It looks at the forces that shape us into who we're becoming. It's about the inherent idolatry of childhood and what's it's like to shear away from that. It's about recognising the humanity in everyone -- not just the people we 'graciously' condescend to out of our perceived social or economic or intellectual superiority (one of the most uncomfortable things about Watchman), but the people we once thought we looked up to.

My consensus is: you should definitely read it. It's less powerful than To Kill A Mockingbird, maybe, but also, perhaps, more real.

Waiting for Watchman:

I'm very excited about the release of Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman tomorrow, but it's a hesitant sort of excitement. I like to avoid buzz if I can, preferring to form my own opinion before reading through someone else's eyes, so I've tried to steer clear of spoilery stuff. But it's hard to avoid. The literary world is spinning, and I guess rightly so. Harper Lee has managed to maintain an almost Emily-Dickinson-like silence since the sixties, adding to the allure already created by the near-mythic nature of her "just one novel" history.

But the fact that Lee is now living in a nursing home, having suffered a stroke in 2007, makes me nervous that perhaps the magical discovery of this 'prequel-written-sequel to Mockingbird' isn't all it's cracked up to be. Apparently Lee hasn't reread the manuscript, which seems an unlikely choice if she were actively involved in the publication project. I hope she has agency here, but it's hard to tell.

Then there is the fact that the preorder price for this book is incredibly high. The lowest I was able to find here in Australia when I was placing my order was $30, which is definitely on the high end for a not-particularly-long text. Physical bookstore prices I've seen hover around the $32-45 mark. Since this is substantially higher than other similar-length hardcovers on the market, I can't help but feel that publishers are capitalising on the buzz. I understand it; bookselling is a business just like anything else. But it feels a little wrong. Why does the book need to be so much more expensive than others?

Another facet giving me pause is the fact that Watchman is, in fact, Mockingbird in its infancy. Harper Lee's editor took a look at the manuscript -- voiced by an adult Scout -- and suggested Lee rewrite it from the perspective of Scout as a child. Go Set a Watchman was shelved and To Kill A Mockingbird was born. Perhaps the editor was an idiot; Watchman was brilliant, and Mockingbird proves to be a mere foretaste of that. Or maybe the editor had some actual chops and made a wonderful editorial call, drawing from Harper Lee something even more polished and excellent. If the former proves to be true, then we are in for a real treat. But if it's the latter -- and this is where my anticipations lie -- then Watchman will be fascinating, but not brilliant. It might simply read like the early draft of something that needed serious polishing in order to make it great.

Finally, there is the conversation milling around the fact that Watchman's Atticus Finch is quite a different character to the kind, politically correct, and-nerdy-hot dad of Mockingbird. If early reviews are accurate, Watchman's Atticus is quite the bigot, voicing a whole slew of racially-cruel remarks. This of all concerns, however, is the one that haunts me the least. I'm a hopeful writer not worthy to kiss the ground Nelle Harper Lee walks on, but I can recognise that two drafts of a novel are not the same novel, and in the same way, a rewritten character may become an entirely new person.

Some fans are worried that reading about a racist Atticus will taint their vision of the "real" Atticus, but I think -- I hope -- that it'll be possible to read both Atticuses as their own, distinct characters. Van Gogh painted many self-portraits, but we'd never superimpose them on one another and claim one to be the Definitive Van Gogh and all the rest mere copies that either add or detract from the original. In the same way, I hope that we'll be able to read both Atticus Finches as disparate characters that reveal different aspects of Harper Lee's mind, motivation, and imagination.

For all his shining ways, Mockingbird's Atticus Finch was not a perfect character, criticised by some as a warped picture of well-meaning but miguided white superiority condescending to assist those "less fortunate." Perhaps a grumpy, cruel, and bigoted Atticus Finch will teach us things that the kind and noble Atticus never could.

A letter to Gillian Murray in class 10D, year unknown:

Dear Gillian Murray,

Thanks for your copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. I don't know if you had anything to do with me ending up with it or whether it was outside of your control. The worst-case scenario is that someone took your book without your knowledge and it ended up for sale in a thrift store. The best-case scenario I can think of is that you got a newer, shinier edition and donated your old one. I certainly hope you didn't dismiss and dump it just because it was 'only a book I read in high school.' I hope you loved it.

I love it. I love it in all its incarnations. But I love this edition in particular, with its ugly yellow cover, bare of any embellishments save one single font listing the title, the author, and various accomplishments (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize/Over 11,000,000 copies sold) in two different sizes. I love its questionable capitalisation and the odd choice to break the word mockingbird in half, so that the cover looks like this:

To Kill a

Mocking-

bird

Interesting choice, typesetters. I like you for it. You break rules badly, and somehow it works. But I'm not here to talk to you. I'm here to talk to Gillian Murray, of class 10D.

I know you were in 10D, Gillian, because you wrote it in the first page, in pencil, in elongated block writing. You also coloured in the gaps in the the Os, Bs, and D of the title. On the second page, a freer, messier hand has again scrawled (this time in pen), Gillian Murray 10D. I'm guessing that was your teacher. (She didn't need to do that. I much prefer your scribbles.)

I'm guessing, too, that she told you to annotate your book. To make notes so that when you came to write your paper or take your exam, you'd have sucked all the meaning and marrow from the text and be ready to discuss it at length. I'm also guessing that she (I'm making an assumption here that your teacher is a woman, probably because most of my teachers have been) didn't exactly teach you how to annotate, or which parts to draw meaning from. Because some of the things you made note of aren't very noteworthy.

On page 21 you've underlined just one word: Flick. What is it about that word that was significant for you? I'm intrigued. You also underlined the moment where Scout catches Dill out in a lie: first he says his dad had a black beard and then he says his father is clean-shaven. It's an interesting moment, sure, but why that moment, when so many others remain underline-free?

I like that you've hunted out definitions for words you weren't sure about. Next to vapid, you've pencilled in "empty." Next to malevolent, you've written "wicket, evil." Your brain must've switched the d in 'wicked' for a t somewhere between dictionary and book.

I also like that you've written little summaries for each chapter. At chapter one, you scrawled, "The children and Dill. Boo Radley. Background." At chapter two, you wrote, "School, Scout and Miss Caroline." (Obviously not an Oxford comma girl, and that's okay. I can appreciate our differences.) At chapter three, you wrote, "Scout, school Atticus and Scout reading."

Mostly, your little chapter summaries follow this predictable pattern. Then at chapter six you wrote only "Lost pants." This, in itself, is wonderful. But at chapter seven you scribbled, "Folded pants."

Lost pants.
Folded pants.

Those little annotations give me chills. You got it. You pinpointed an incredibly powerful moment in the book, a turning point in the story and a moment when the children -- Jem especially -- have their eyes opened (just beginning to be opened, really) to possibilities of humanness hidden where they originally saw only monsters and madness.

Entire theses could be written about those lost pants/folded pants. Short films made about them. Those pants say a lot. And you recognised that.

You nailed it, Gillian, and I'm so glad that, in a weird time-warpy sort of way, I get to read this book along with you.

What I loved and didn't love about I Was Here:

I have read or partially read five of Gayle Forman’s books, and her writing is a bit of a fascinating contradiction for me. On the one hand, her stories tend to be romances that stick close to cliché. From the first meet-cute (or meet-awkward), we know who the leading lady and the leading man are meant to be. A broken girl gets healed by a possibly broken boy. Or a broken boy gets healed by a possibly broken girl. Love is magical, you know how it goes.

On the other hand, Forman’s writing itself is good. Although the underlying structure isn’t always unique, I think her voice itself is. I think Forman writes sometimes weak stories in strong ways. On a compare-and-contrast system that boils characters down to their attributes, Forman's characters might come out looking remarkably similar to other teen romance characters. Within the novels themselves, though, they tend to have strong voices -- and their stories are compelling.

As well, Forman’s settings shine. The European backdrops of her Just One Day and Just One Year read like delightful travelogues, while her latest, I Was Here, is a combined celebration/lamentation of small-town life.

If I had to pick, I’d say I Was Here is Forman’s most powerful novel so far. It’s certainly the one with the most mature subject matter. But it might also be her most unsettling. From the book’s summary:

When her best friend Meg drinks a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner alone in a motel room, Cody is understandably shocked and devastated. She and Meg shared everything – so how was there no warning? But when Cody travels to Meg’s college town to pack up the belongings left behind, she discovers that there’s a lot that Meg never told her. About her roommates, the sort of people Cody would never have met in her dead-end small town in Washington. About Ben McAllister, the boy with a guitar and a sneer who broke Meg’s heart. And about an encrypted computer file that Cody can’t open – until she does, and suddenly everything Cody thought she knew about her best friend’s death gets thrown into question.

As Cody attempts to trace Meg’s path to such a devastating and final decision, I Was Here reads like a psychological thriller. But the mystery, though Cody doesn’t realise it herself, is really just the skeleton that she hangs her heavy grief upon. Cody is trying to heal herself – or perhaps absolve herself – while finding a reason, something on which to pin the blame for her best friend’s death. It’s as though the light of Cody’s world went out with Meg’s death, and everywhere she goes in her small town, the darkness lingers.

Here’s what I liked about I Was Here:

1) I appreciated the sharp pacing and the sometimes chilling tone. Here is a book that doesn’t joke about dark things – or if it does, the humour is dry and bleak, all thinly-veiled desperation and grief. Sometimes that maybe errs on the side of melodrama, but the adjective that comes most to mind is raw. In I Was Here, Cody’s grief, Meg’s parents’ grief, Ben’s grief, all of it is raw, and that comes through in the text.

2) Similarly, it’s honest about depression and its messiness, about the confusion and desperation it brings for those who don’t struggle with it but are trying to understand it for the ones they love.

3) Two shining characters stand out for me: one of Meg’s former roommates, Harry Kang, and Cody’s fairly messed-up mother. Harry is an adorable, nerdy Christian guy who helps Cody out, in spite of her prickly attitude and outright scary vibes. He’s genuinely pleased to use his tech skills to uncover some of the mystery behind Meg’s suicide, but he’s also kind, and cares about Cody’s welfare. Basically, everyone needs a Harry Kang in their lives. Then there’s Cody’s mom, whose child-raising technique up to this point has been to leave Cody to her own devices and focus instead on whoever the latest boyfriend is. But a few moments prove that maybe she sees more than she lets on. In one of my favourite lines from the book, she tells Cody, ‘You had a pile of rocks, and you cleaned them up pretty and made a necklace. Meg got jewels, and she hung herself with them.’ The second part may prove to be a lie, but the first part is definitely true.

Here’s what I didn’t like so much about I Was Here:

1) It seems like every strength can also be turned into a weakness on its flip side, and for me one of those weaknesses was the fact that I Was Here could perhaps be too dark. Since the book starts in the aftermath of Meg’s death, there is a hopelessness to the story that can be quite heavy. We know that, no matter what Cody uncovers, Meg is still going to be dead at the end of the book, and nothing can quite change that. We know, as well, that there are no shortcuts to grief. Time takes time, and that makes this book a fairly heavy one.

2) It could be incredibly triggering. I Was Here delves in-depth into Meg’s approach to suicide, the community that she surrounded herself with to encourage that, and her actual process of taking her own life. On one hand, this could be a really helpful for those struggling to understand a loved one’s depression or even suicide. On the other hand, for someone wrestling with those very things, this book could be unhelpfully triggering. At times I cringed as I read certain lines, thinking of how that might ring in the ears of those struggling with their own darkness.

3) Call me a prude (‘PRUDE!’), but there was too much swearing for me. There can be a jarring sort of violence to profanity that rattles around noisily in your head. I think this is especially so when the words are used with the full force of their literality – which is the case in several instances in I Was Here. My preference for cleaner texts is based on my own personal tastes and, largely, my faith. I understand that a well-chosen curse-word can communicate volumes – and I totally get that even if I don’t choose to use those words, the majority of the world around me does. I simply think that if they have to be there, they should be fewer – and, as a result, more powerful.

I Was Here is a road trip story, a coming-of-age story, a mystery, a romance. However, to be honest, the romance could’ve been done away with for me and the story would still have been powerful. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of sexual healing that this book suggests, that two grieving teenagers can ‘fix’ one another just by being together. Two broken people coming together in a broken way doesn’t magically make everything right. And although I was won over in a small way by the love interest in the end, I felt slightly manipulated, as though he was one type of person at the beginning of the story and another type of person at the end, but not as a result of character development -- just because. So I could have quite happily enjoyed the story without the romance at all.

After all, the ultimate love story of I Was Here is actually the love story of one friend for another, which is incredibly important, but far more rare in YA fiction.

A refusal to let sleeping blogs lie.

I like to think of myself as a person who values variety. But this is really just a kinder way of saying that I have a short attention span.

I crave a bit of mixy-mix in work and creativity, and I like pondering a few ideas or projects at once, pausing to switch gears whenever I need to clear the fuzz. This is the reason that I usually have between three and ten books on the go at any given time (you just never know what you're going to feel like reading at any moment. The book you read on a long car trip is not the same book you read while you eat sushi on your lunch break or the one you try -- and fail -- to read two hasty pages of before you fall asleep).

It's also the reason that I've found myself with a firm handful of reading resolutions this year, instead of just a couple. Last year, I really stuck with two: to read sixty books (just scraped in with a couple of days to spare) and to read more books in translation. Both things happened, but overall my reading felt very unintentional -- like something that happened to me, rather than something I was measured and thoughtful about. Of course, you can't help but think about the books you read -- you can't help but be changed by them. And I did read some lovely ones in 2014. However, it all felt just a little haphazard.

With that thought nudging me forward, my overarching reading goal in 2015 is really just to be more intentional about what and how I read. I'm not a hundred percent certain what this even looks like, except that I know I want to read books that are outside my comfort zone, books that I'm not naturally drawn to, books that might be a hard slog but a good investment. I have a bunch (too many, really) of practical, measurable ways I want to do this. They look like less vague and more "real" resolutions, and I'll write further about those soon.

However, I also know that I'd like to read more thoughtfully. To me, this means possibly reading less, but reading more deeply. It also means making more of an effort to consider what I'm reading, to frame my own responses into words -- essentially, to not just take in, but also (for better or for worse) to respond to what I'm writing. And that's why I've pulled this blog from whatever pixellated shelf it was hiding on, gathering dust mites (dust bytes? hyuck hyuck), and brushed away what is apparently more than two years of disuse.

Hello 2012, remember us? We're back, it's 2015, and we love books and words more than ever.

Serendipity and silkworms:

It was a happy accident that I picked up both Michael Gerard Bauer's The Running Man and Belinda Jeffrey's One Long Thread around the same time. Bauer's book was published in 2004 and Jeffrey's just this year, and although one is about a young boy at the fringes of his teenage years and the other about an older girl already navigating those murky waters, there were similarities between the two books that surprised and delighted me.

Both books possess a sort of natural, unaffected Australian sensibility. There is a subtle, quiet awareness of place and its value in shaping the identity of a growing young person. In what is a rarity today, both books are strongly character-centric, focussed on the interchange of relationships and the unfolding of everyday events rather than on cataclysmic, action-packed moments.

Both, too, are coming-of-age stories. In The Running Man, Joseph grapples with the absence of his less-than-perfect father while attempting to make sense of his reclusive and tormented Ashgrove neighbour Tom Leyton. In One Long Thread, Ruby Moon is left stranded and bewildered by the splitting in half of her family through divorce. She stays with her loving, stable dad in Sydney while her twin sister Sally is taken off to live with their fragile, increasingly religious and ritualistic mother in Darwin.

Both books are about young people finding their place in the world by meeting head on with the pain and grief of others. Neither of the books shy away from the tough stuff. The Running Man deals with war, post-traumatic stress disorder, the loss of faith, and ugly rumours of inappropriate behaviour towards children. One Long Thread explores divorce, death, and teen pregnancy. But both treat these subjects gently, reverently, and respectfully.

Perhaps the most sweetly startling of the similarities, though, was the fact that silkworms play a powerful role in both stories. These unassuming little creatures provide the catalyst in both books for the breaking down of relational and psychological barriers. In The Running Man, the care and feeding of a silkworm colony (is that what they're called?) slowly builds a bond of friendship in an otherwise intense and awkward environment. In One Long Thread, the process of harvesting silk from the insects' cocoons helps Ruby open up and explore her feelings of abandonment, loss, and confusion, all the while drawing close to a beloved family member she never expected to get to know.

The Running Man by Michael Gerard Bauer (2004) is published by Omnibus Books. One Long Thread by Belinda Jeffrey (2012) is published by the University of Queensland Press. Both are beautifully-written works of Australian fiction for young adults.

If Dr Seuss had written Twilight?

This is truly genius, from a commenter replying to an article on how famous writers would have written Twilight:

Jake likes a girl. Her name is Bella.
Bella likes a different fella.

See this vamp? This is Ed.
Ed is pale. Ed is dead.

Ed saved Bella from a van.
Ed must be a special man.

Ed won't kill boys. He won't kill girls.
Ed gets fed on deer and squirrels.

This is James. He's a tracker.
He's a sort of vamp attacker.

James hunts Bella for a thrill.
Will Ed kill him? Yes, he will.

But James gave her a little bite.
Will she be a vamp? She might!

Edward fixes Bella's cut.
She won't be a vampire.
But...

She becomes one. Read some more.
She's a vampire in book 4.

[source]