20150208.0817

I have made no secret that much of my freelance work consists of me reading novels that have been brought to the forefront of popular attention through their presence on bestseller lists and writing up what amount to study notes and book guides about them. It is easy work, if perhaps time-consuming, and caters to those strengths I have developed through years of formal literary study and practice after the formal study was done. (It pays well, too, and I do not find fault with that. Honestly, I wish I could recommend the line for which I do the ghost-written write-ups here; more people buying them means more work for me in writing them, and thus more money. But I do not think I can get away with that.)

The current project is a bit of an outlier; I am reading and writing up Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a classic novel familiar from schoolroom reading lists and returned to particular prominence by the fraught announcement of another Lee novel to be published. It has been some years since I read the book--it may well have been high school, which is half a lifetime ago for me, anymore--and while I am not opposed to treating something with a bit more...heft than is common for me to handle with the freelance work I do, I do find myself in a bit of a quandary. For such a book as To Kill a Mockingbird has already much written about it, and finding what little bits of understanding can be pulled from the text that have not already been, particularly since the book lies well outside my normal areas of expertise, will prove something of a challenge. (Given the choice, I would get paid for easy work rather than difficult. More reward for less expenditure is more profit, after all, and profit is good, is it not?)

Then again, finding new things to say about works already long discussed is something with which I ought to be familiar as a scholar of medieval literatures and cultures. Chaucer, the Pearl-poet, Malory, and others all have had much said about them, and across centuries, yet there are still new things to find within them, new things to say about them. Lee, for all her skill and for all the relevance and cultural penetration of her work (for I think I am far from alone in having read the book in high school), has not had nearly so much attention paid her as have those authors I normally confront. It may be an anti-presentist conceit to say so, just as the idea that there is nothing else of value to find in the works of old is a fallacious presentist assertion, but I think there is yet room to work with the novel. And, even if it will be a challenge to wade through what has already been said about the piece (which I may or may not do; the demands of the job are not the kind that demand that I make a full survey of current scholarship--or even a passing one), it is the kind of thing that I enjoy doing. Added to the pay, it makes the freelance bit attractive, indeed.