SparkNotes started in 1999, when four Harvard graduates dreamed up, a portal to host their new matchmaking service. And each is compartmentalized into familiar rubrics: summary, analysis, themes, symbols, motifs, context, character list, analysis of major characters, and, of course, a multiple-choice quiz. If, as Henry James wrote, a work of fiction is a house with a million windows, SparkNotes are condo units: they’re all the same size and shape, whether they summarize The Outsiders or War and Peace. Last August, I wrote the SparkNotes for Go Set a Watchman. To Kill a Mockingbird showed me how to create a fully realized, sensory world. Dubose dies, the white box that her servant gives to Jem with one pristine, waxy camellia resting inside. The day when Jem, in a sudden rampage, snatches Scout’s baton and shears off all the buds and flowers on the camellia bushes. Dubose with her perfect camellias, ivory and globular against the glossy leaves. Miss Maudie’s house going up in flames, like a pumpkin, and her prized azaleas frozen and charred in the aftermath. I remember the book in discrete images: Dill’s duckweed-like tufts of hair. I read it, reread it, and reread it again, sitting in an attic bedroom of my grandparents’ house, hunched on the green shag carpet. In the corner, a crescent moon as thin as a tea-stain rose above a clot of green trees. Its cover featured the knot of a tree with a pocket watch and a ball of yarn inside, a mockingbird stamped in silhouette. My copy of Mockingbird was a cheap lilac paperback. The summer when I was eight, I read two books: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and To Kill a Mockingbird.
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