“You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them,” said Atticus Finch.
Through his daughter Scout’s memories about her prepubescent childhood in the racially segregated Deep South of the 1930s, I feel like I’ve walked around in the shoes of lots of characters.
That’s what a wonderful book imparts to the reader: that you’re not merely reading words on a page but that you’re entering someone’s life and sharing their shoes.
It took me months to read the 323 pages of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and I finally forced myself this morning to read the final 150 pages in one sitting including the above quote from the second-to-last page.
I don’t know why I didn’t read the novel sooner. It was never assigned reading material in high school or college; and when I graduated both, I was never inspired to pick it up. Roaming the library at the beginning of this summer, I made a choice and checked it out.
That was a good choice.