OF COURSE, IF YOU'RE SMART YOU HAVE MOCKINGBIRD ON YOUR iPOD (via The Mother Judd):

To read Harper Lee (Boston Globe, July 5, 2006)

FOR YEARS, Harper Lee has lived in the city of famous, silent writers alongside even more mute neighbors like J.D. Salinger. Her 1960 book, ``To Kill a Mockingbird," about a black man accused of rape in a Southern town, made her a literary legend. But Lee herself has hardly spoken publicly since then, turning down interview requests, letting her novel speak for itself, offering no news of a second book, and declining to cooperate with Charles Shields, who wrote the recent biography ``Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee."

Enter Oprah Winfrey. The queen of talk has done readers a favor, cracking the silence by publishing a letter from Lee in the current issue of O, Winfrey's magazine, making it seem like an easy matter to pry a reclusive writer out of privacy, implying that nearly anyone who is asked can't resist answering Oprah.

The letter begins: ``Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn't know how?" It goes on to talk about Lee's father, who read four newspapers, and the ways children swapped books with one another against a Depression-era backdrop of nothing-else-to-do: no parks, no movies, and ``nothing you could call a public library."

``We were privileged," Lee continues, recalling that she ``arrived at the first grade literate," unlike children from rural areas who had ``never looked into a book until they went to school." Many children of African-American servants, she writes, learned to read ``three children to one book." Not surprisingly, Lee bemoans the present abundance of iPods and cellphones.

It's an interesting meditation on the wealth endowed through reading, and the highly relative nature of a word like ``privileged."