Fifty - and Seventy - years on. Oh yes, and pictures.

Stayed up past my bedtime last night to watch the BBC4 documentary on 'To Kill a Mockingbird' , visting Montgomery, Alabama 50 years after the book was published. As Harper Lee has steadfastly refused to be interviewed about the book for years, there wasn't much that was new in the programme, although it did contain a terrifying interview with Ku Klux Klan member - terrifying because this Grand Wizard (or maybe just an Ordinary Wizard?) was entirely calm and open about how he doesn't hate 'niggers'. He doesn't hate dogs either, simply regarding both as inferior creatures who need to be controlled and if necessary killed. I did have to keep reminding myself that it's supposed to be 2010, although in this man's self-professedly 'closed mind' it is forever 1930 it would seem.

Lots of people appear to have read 'Mockingbird' as a set text at school so it is (deservedly) very well known. (I never got 'TKaM' as a set text, I had Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights, and Great Expectations and The Mill on the Floss. Also a book which is apparently very popular and much loved, 'Jock of the Bushveld' by Percy Fitzpatrick. Perhaps I should give it another go, because I keep reading glowing reviews and comments about it, but my only memory is of complete dreary tedium, and at the end when (spoiler alert) the dog dies, twenty-five 12-year-old girls all chorused 'Good!'. Which must mean something.)

Anyway, whether you read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' at school, or discovered it for yourself, it's always worth a re-read. As well as standard paperbacks, we have a hard-back copy printed for the 50th anniversary, which would make a great gift.
If you haven't read it - please do so at once!


Moving on, but actually, I now realise, staying on-topic, I've just started reading 'Alone in Berlin', by Hans Fallada, and am completely hooked and finding it hard to put down. It's described as 'utterly gripping' by Justin Cartwright (who he? I thought, so trotted along the fiction shelves and remembered - shortlisted for the Booker with 'In Every Face I Meet', winner of the Whitbread Award for 'Leading the Cheers' - that J Cartwright.....).

The novel is a crime story/thriller set in Berlin during WW2, lightly fictionalising (is that a word?) the story of a couple who quietly resisted the Nazi system by spreading anti-Party propaganda, and who were caught and executed. The rather tenuous 'link' to 'Mockingbird' is in the depiction of a society which accepts injustice and evil and how difficult it is to change when the majority, for whatever reason, are maintaining the status quo. I'm only a couple of chapters in, but would urge you to read it.

Finally, for now, if you come into the shop over the summer, to look for these, or something else for holiday reading, be sure to go upstairs to see the exhibitions of local artists' work.
Details on the website - www.whitehorsebooks.co.uk