To Kill A Mockingbird, Entry 1

For my classic, I am reading To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. According to the Internet, this book is rated 4.5 stars. However, I have heard mixed reviews about this book from the people to whom I have talked. During one of our group book talks in class, some of my peers explained that they really disliked this book. They felt it had no plot and they couldn’t get into it. Other people, on the other hand, have said that they loved this book, and couldn’t put it down, and it’s a great book that I’ll love (not to mention, it’s a quick read, even though it’s long, which is what I really need at this point in the project...). So far, I am not really liking this book, but then again, I am only on page 6. I found that the introductory pages up to this point are really confusing. The narrator just introduces characters as if I have known them my whole life. What I mean is that normally in books, the author might say, “Ari was a great friend of mine and she was a wonderful person and she had brown hair and I knew her from school” (Goldberg 1). However, this author says would say things like (and this is not a quote from the book, I am just using a made-up quote to emphasize my point more clearly and keep it more consistent with my previous example), “Ari went to school one time and broke her arm. Then Elle went to school and took a test. Then Arielle took a math class” (Goldberg 2). How am I supposed to know anything about the characters and their place in the story from that?! I also do not know anything about the plot of the story, but I’m guessing it probably does not have much to do with a mocking bird hunting trip, because why would a classic book have a title that has anything to do with the plot of the book? It’s probably just some symbolic reference made once in the book, but I guess I’m making a lot of conclusions without actually reading... On that note, I better go read more!