The Highest Standard: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Everyone had read this book but me. Friends who recently saw me with it in my hands said, "You're reading that again?" and I replied, "Nope, I'm reading it for the first time." Then they'd ask, "Didn't you have to read it in high school?" and I'd say, "No, we didn't read books with female characters" (this is mostly true, though I didn't even realize it myself until years later).

But I wish we'd read "To Kill a Mockingbird." I don't mean to suggest that I was unmoved by what we were required to read, but I was admittedly an atypical case as a total bookworm. "To Kill a Mockinbird" seems to me like the perfect book for high school students to read, and I'm glad that some are still required to. My evidence: At work I'm always getting surly-looking, uninspired teens trudging up to the reference desk asking for it. Now (as in this past week) I tell them, "You're going to love it," and they look at me like I'm approximately 85 years-old and therefore completely unqualified to comment on what they might like. I wish just one of them would come back and tell me that they loved it, because it would at least confirm my suspicion that it's exactly what we're hoping for whenever we open a book. I'm going to repeat that because it's important: I suspect that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is exactly what what we're hoping for whenever we open a book. It is the standard to which I'll now hold everything else I read.

Without going on about the plot and the characters and the themes (I'm sure it's unecessary because, like I said, everyone had read this book but me), I'll just back up my theory by saying that it's a hugely complex book about ugly realities, and it still somehow manages to be the most enjoyable entertainment. It's perfect. Obviously it goes to the top of the list. I can't believe it took me 27 years to pick it up.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Enormously influential, it stirs readers in all directions to this day: It has made the American Library Association's annual list of banned/challenged books almost every year since its publication in 1960. Again, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is exactly what we're hoping for whenever we open a book.