Harper Lee, the reclusive US author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has written a rare published piece - a letter to a magazine about reading as a child.

She tells O, The Oprah Magazine, that in her Depression-era Alabama village "youngsters had little to do but read".

 

The 80-year-old adds that in today's society "where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books".

 

To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee's only novel, won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize.

 

Lee tells a special summer reading issue of Oprah Winfrey's magazine that she must have learned to read "from having been read to by my family".

 

"My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them," she writes.

 

"My mother read me a story every day, usually a children's classic, and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening."

 

She asks: "And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer?

 

"Some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal."

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk

:2thumbsup: :D

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird

and she's not the only one who still likes to enjoy a good book once in a while :)

Hail To Kill A Mockingbird!!! (I still read it once a year)

 

I think it was a smart move; not doing a second novel...

Undecided about Harper Lee although I love 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and her comment about Gregory Peck being the perfect Atticus Finch. I feel my own dad is similar to him, albeit not a lawyer.

 

I have a computer, cellphones and an ipod, but I still read and I certainly don't have an empty mind. :(