Remember when you were little and you had a favorite picture book that you asked everyone – mom, dad, grandparents – to read to you? How many times was that book read to you? I bet I have read To Kill a Mockingbird that many times.

I began to re-read TKAM again last week, and as always, I felt like I was welcoming an old friend back into my life. I know this book so well, and yet it gives me something new every time I read it. Students’ insights into the book also give me a fresh perspective on the book each year. (See the Student Zone of our Mind Candy student blog for their thinking about TKAM.)

Yet there are questions I ask every time I read it that I never quite get answered: What are “Big Mules,” who was “Lorenzo Dow,” and is the Gray Ghost a real book or something that sounds real that Harper Lee made up? No matter. These details add resonance to the story but you don’t need to know all the answers to follow the plot.

Are there stories you like to re-read? Why do we enjoy reading things over and over? Have you ever re-read something and not enjoyed it as much as you recalled? I’d love to hear about your experiences with re-reading.

The premise of this delightful, witty novella is what happens when the Queen of England, through a chance encounter with a bookmobile, discovers books and begins to read. As Her Royal Highness delves deeper and deeper into the world of words (biography, novels, philosophy, poetry, etc.), she is slowly changed and ultimately so is the country.

Two of my favorite things about reading are contained within the above paragraphs: transformation and sharing.

No one who reads avoids being changed by what they read.  Even reading a newspaper article about an airplane crash, a bid for the 2016 Olympics, or the historic election of the first African-American president, the reader is transformed. Information, images and ideas are stored, compared, acknowledged or disavowed, connected, incorporated, and evaluated. This is truer still when readers encounter more substantive works.

I think Mrs. Kline, Mrs. Paprocki and Mrs. Pagakis all teach because they believe this, which, of course, is why I wanted to share The Uncommon Reader with them.

The most and only essential relationship in reading is that between the writer and the reader. Yet reading can be and often is a social act. This book is a case in point: a friend of my mother recommended The Uncommon Reader to her, and she passed it along to me. As I read the book, I made a mental list of all the people I looked forward to sharing it with. I anticipated the conversations we would have about it: our favorite allusions, those we missed (Who was Ivy Compton-Burnett?), the laugh-out-loud moments, HRH’s progression through the genres of literature, and, of course, our joy at reading a work of fiction that conveys the passion for reading we try to instill in our students every day.

Even the common reader cannot avoid the power of books.