Tag: Harper Lee

Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird

Usually, I try to highlight newer releases on the blog, but this year, the CAMALS Foundation is launching a new Community Book Read, and the first book selected for it is perennial favorite To Kill A Mockingbird. And I thought it was the perfect opportunity to revisit this classic.

Precocious Jean Louise Finch–or Scout as she’s affectionately called by her family and friends–has a comparatively idyllic life in Depression-era Alabama. The youngest child of a widowed lawyer, she enjoys playing with her older brother Jem and their quirky sometimes neighbor Dill in their small town and being read to by her father Atticus. But her carefree existence comes to a screeching halt when her father begins representing Tom Robinson, an African American accused of rape. Scout is too young to always follow what is happening, but she recognizes the palpable shift in public opinion toward her family.

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Casey Cep’s Furious Hours (2019)

Furious Hours

Harper Lee is famous for her beloved classic To Kill A Mockingbird-–just last year it won The Great American Read and was so universally popular that it always led the public’s voting for favorite book by a wide margin for the entire duration of the vote.

However, Lee is perhaps just as famous for the fact that To Kill A Mockingbird is her only book. Sure, publishers released her Go Set a Watchman a few years ago, but in truth, that was just the very early draft of To Kill A Mockingbird and not a new book.

That’s not to say that Lee never tried to write another book, however.

According to Casey Cep’s debut Furious Hours, Lee worked for years on a true crime manuscript about a bizarre case of murder and insurance fraud in 1960s/1970s Alabama. . . .

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And the Great Berryville Read winner is . . .

For the past several weeks, we’ve been voting through the Great Berryville Read brackets. Last night, we unveiled our local winner and then watched the countdown for the national vote live at our results party at the library.

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2016 Library Challenge: An Author’s First Book

For the month of May, we’re going to be focusing on authors–we’ll be looking at the various author-specific challenges from the 2016 Library Challenge, we’re highlighting authors who’ll be at Books in Bloom later this month, and we even have a display set up at the front of the library to spotlight author’s first novels. So, it only makes sense for us to kick off our focus on authors with a post about reading an author’s first book. I must confess, while I was researching this post, I was really startled to learn some of these books were these authors’ debuts because they already possess such polish.

As always, if you’re interested in any of the books featured in the post, you can learn more about them on our online library catalog.

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