So, I think there was a huge misunderstanding here. I signed up for a possibly outdated story on racism and segregation. This is more of a coming-of-age story of a young girl in the Great Depression without much of a plot, and on her side of the river, not an even an inch of conflict. Maybe something about being treated unfairly because she’s a girl and the whole business with the reclusive neighbour she and her brother enjoy pestering every once in a while, but that’s it.

Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we make Atticus the main character? Crazy, right? Maybe that way the story can start on chapter 1 instead of 15?

So, there’s two things wrong with this book in my opinion: storytelling and unremarkable themes. The first is explained rather easily, Harper Lee is not a good storyteller. She may or may not have a good story to tell, but she certainly doesn’t know how to tell one. If you were to try and break down its components, its didactic elements (the ones people enjoy talking about) happen during the trial scenes, or anything involving race, because everything else is meandering nonsense that can work under different circumstances, but didn’t find me in a particularly good mood for reading.

The second one is a bit more complicated to get into, but the gist of it is that To Kill a Mockingbird is an insufficiently good deconstruction of racism and/or race relations in the United States (from which I’m not from, by the way). Look, I don’t remember a single conversation of a black character in the entire book except for some that relate to Calpurnia, a stock character. That’s fucking depressing. I’m not mad at Lee for that, but is this where Americans think literature on racism peaked? Really? Spike Lee’s worst movie is still better than this liberal nonsense.

So yeah, far from the worst book I have read, but quite possibly my least favourite reading in years. Apart from some scenes worth giving a shot, it’s a hard skip.