I love "To Kill A Mockingbird" -- despite the fact that I had never read the book before I found myself expected to teach it when I began teaching. Yet having read it many times since, and having taught it nearly a dozen times (when you include summer school sessions), I really do believe it is a book that every adult ought to read -- both from the point of view of its moral message AND due to the fact it is a great read. So when I hear folks criticize the book for its flaws and question whether it should be read, I bristle just a bit.

If there's one book you should read before you die, it's To Kill a Mockingbird. That's not my opinion. Apparently I was sick back in ninth grade when every other American kid read Harper Lee's novel of racism, moral courage and coming of age in 1930s Alabama. I read it for the first time only this week and have my misgivings.

But according to the Guardian newspaper's Web site, a 2006 poll of librarians — British librarians — put To Kill a Mockingbird atop the list of books every adult should read before they shuffle off. Ahead of the Bible. Ahead of Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice and even Harry "the Franchise" Potter.

According to a 1989 study in this country, 69 percent of public schools, 67 percent of Catholic schools and 47 percent of other private schools teach the book, most often in the ninth grade. And it's still assigned regularly, three Houston-area educators say.

For many young people, To Kill a Mockingbird, more than 45 years after its publication, looms like that first tattoo as a milestone on the road to adulthood. It has become, as Slate's Stephen Metcalf writes,"an inescapable fact of America's civic religion."

So what's its appeal? Why a fixture on school reading lists? And what's its status in the canon of American literature? Is it really a book for grown-ups?

As I've said, I think it is a great book -- but that doesn't mean that TKAM is a perfect book. There are obvious flaws in Harper Lee's classic, some of which are mentioned later in the article.

In a New Yorker review of Charles J. Shields' new biography of Harper Lee, Thomas Mallon savages Mockingbird for its moral simplicity and implausible characters. He calls Atticus Finch a "plaster saint" with a way "of making forbearance itself insufferable."

Mallon calls Scout "a kind of highly constructed doll, feisty and cute on every subject from algebra to grown-ups," her voice a "forced mixture" of the child and the adult.

He wraps things up by describing the novel as "a kind of moral Ritalin, an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious." The movie, he writes, is "rather better."

This smackdown prompted Stephen Metcalf, Slate's critic at large, to read the book for the first time and weigh in with a qualified endorsement. He likes Scout, calling her a clever child whose "cleverness nonetheless never interferes with her innocence, and whose innocence is finally a near-flawless arbiter of right and wrong."

He acknowledges that Lee mixes child and adult perspectives but praises the book's voice as being "almost always fetching, often vivid, and the small-town manners it captures are keenly observed." He particularly admires how the book evokes and critiques Southern white-class snobbery.

I find myself leaning a little Mallon's way. I don't find either Atticus or Scout particularly plausible. The black characters are long-suffering and large-hearted in a way that, today, comes across as condescending. Scout too often sounds like no child I ever met — too smart, too spunky.

Of course, I lean towards Metcalf. I like to point out to folks that there is a reason that Scout sounds like a mixture of child and adult -- the Scout that narrates the story is not a little girl, but is instead an adult woman approaching thirty, telling a story about her childhood. Indeed, the voice we hear is that of Miss Jean Louise Finch (or maybe Mrs. Charles Baker Harris -- my kids one year debated whether or not she ended up married to Dill) telling a childhood story. And like most of us telling such stories in our adulthood, we make ourselves both a little bit more innocent and a little more wise than we probably were -- it is human nature. And while Atticus comes across as a "plaster saint", isn't that how we saw our parents when we were young? It is therefore reasonable for Harper Lee, through her narrator, to try to capture that child-like view of Atticus.

And then there was that criticism of the presentation of the black characters. let's be honest -- in 1930s Alabama, that was precisely the face that black community showed to whites, even those who showed them sympathy. After all, this was a society where the Klan still held the reins of power -- Kluxer Hugo Black was a US Senator from Alabama when the story begins, and by the time the story ends he would have been nominated as a Supreme Court Justice by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If you were black, you needed to hide that seething anger and discontent, and so Scout would likely never have seen it, even from Calpurnia.

Of course, my favorite point to make with my students is that TKAM is an example of one story framing another. After all, the adult Jean Louis Finch begins the book by telling us it is the story of how her brother Jem broke his arm! Well over 200 pages later, we finally find out how the arm was broken -- but only after learning about life in her small Alabama town, Boo Radley, and the horrible miscarriage of justice that is the Tom Robinson trial.

And perhaps the best thing about the story is that it does leave you wanting to know more about some of the characters. My favorite "untold story"? What experience did Atticus have (presumably during WWI) that led the "One Shot" Finch to permanently put down his rifle until the day he needed to kill a rabid dog? I've often hoped that Harper Lee has written that story, and that it awaits posthumous publication on a dusty bookshelf in her home.

Is To Kill A Mockingbird Shakespeare? No, it isn't -- and does not pretend to be. Still, I believe it to be an important book that ought to be read.

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