A Word on Lee's "Go Set A Watchman"

By now, if you haven't read Go Set A Watchman, the second novel published by Harper Lee, of To Kill A Mockingbird fame, you've at least heard of it; or rather, you've at least heard of the controversy surrounding it. Was Lee, who has spent the last fifty years adamantly refusing to publish anything else, really in a fit state of mind to okay its release? Do the new views of Scout, Atticus, and other beloved characters tarnish our memories of them in Mockingbird? Why do Lee's titles have to have four words and sound vaguely Shakespearean?

How about Find Thyself A Sovereign, or Follow Unto the End?

Despite my reservations as to the legality of its publication, I went ahead and pre-ordered it so that I could waste no time in making a decision. I came home, sat down, and didn't get up again until I had finished. Survey says?

Standing alone, Watchman doesn't have enough literary merit to stand on its own two legs. It never would have been published had it been submitted by a first-time author. And let's not forget, it wasn't published when it was submitted by Lee as a first-time author - the publishers took a look and suggested she re-write it from the perspective of a young Scout, which effort eventually became Mockingbird.

And that brings me to my second, and biggest issue with Watchman. It is clearly not a sequel to Mockingbird. It is a first draft of Mockingbird. Certain facts have been changed, such as the number of Atticus' siblings and where the Finch children spent most of their time growing up - not central to the story, but inescapably incompatible versions. More tellingly, whole phrases, sentences, and pages appear identically in both works. The first time it happened, I quirked my head, thinking it sounded familiar, but not having read Mockingbird in a while, I thought I was just having a deja vu experience. By the third time, I had pulled out my dog-eared pink copy and was flipping through, marking where the same words were appearing.

I'm not going to return Watchman, but I'm not going to recommend it as a piece of literature to anyone, either (as a matter of fact, I got into a conversation about it at Barnes & Noble and convinced two women to spend their money on something more worthy). If you want to study an author's evolving talent, to see how stories can change from draft to draft, go ahead, borrow it or check it out of the library. But if you prefer your novels to be well-written and plot-driven, or if you have reservations about the ethics of reading a first draft of a novel written by an author famously taciturn about her writing, give it a pass. Ultimately, you won't be missing out on much at all.

After a Nuclear Fallout: What Author's Post-Apocalypse Book is Best?

I've been on a nuclear fallout/end of the world/apocalypse kick lately. I blame my friend for this one; he told me about a Reddit discussion thread on Britain's letters of last resort, and after a healthy discussion about what the letters say and what they would say were either of us Prime Ministers (luckily for the inhabitants of this make-believe world, we neither of us believe in vengeance and mutual destruction), I started looking up novels about nuclear war. The consensus seems to be that Nevil Shute's On the Beach and Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz are the two most notable depictions of a post-nuclear world, so I promptly trekked over to the library (I then discovered that my tiny branch had neither in stock, so I turned around and headed home, where I ordered them and sat around twiddling my fingers for two days and meditated on the virtue of patience).

Canticle follows two thousand years of history after a nuclear explosion in the 20th century, detailing the fall, rise, and fall of human civilization. On the Beach is smaller in scope, focusing on the last days of humanity as nuclear fallout from an explosion in the northern hemisphere gradually drifts south, extinguishing all life in its path.

So, which one is better? It depends on what you're looking for. Canticle is a bit more fantastical, due to its forward-looking nature, but its characters discuss heady, weighed issues of faith, morality, and humanity. On the Beach is narrow, and calmer. You spend most of the book as quietly, reading along and wondering where the action is, until you reach the end and the poignancy hits; the simple story echoes the simple lives the characters lead, knowing their death is inevitable, but the actual moment of death is never simple.

Read both. Read Miller in order to ask yourself the tough questions all of us need to face about the possibility of a global armageddon, and read Shute to truly face what the armageddon would mean for humanity.

Laini Taylor's blog: HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL

A word on writing from one of my favorite authors - enjoy!

Laini Taylor's blog: HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL: (hello! I was just going through the archives of my olden times blog, and came across this, written after the experience of having fini...

Hello World!

So . . . hello. How you are doing? Fine, I trust.

I've never written a blog entry before (as if that isn't painfully obvious from my brilliant opening line). I've never written much of anything before. My various attempts at diaries were all well-meant, but drastically short-lived. Looking back, I think I enjoyed the importance having a diary gave a ten-year-old, as well as the fun of sequestering the thing in nooks and crannies no one else could find, more than the actual writing. So, seventeen years later, I'm going to try again. Tally ho!