I’m sadly not much of a reader, but I’ve been around for a long time and I have managed to read a lot during that time.  And by far, my favorite book is the one that everybody loves as their favorite…. To Kill A Mockingbird.  So it is nothing short of awesome that, after a 55 year-long silence, Harper Lee is publishing a sequel to her classic To Kill a Mockingbird.

From just a purely literary viewpoint, this is huge news. Imagine a new J.D. Salinger novel coming to light about Holden Caulfield 20 years later. That’s essentially the premise for Lee’s “new” novel, Go Set a Watchman. I say “new” in quotes because, according to Miss Lee’s account,Watchman was written first and the flashback chapters about Scout Finch’s childhood so captivated Lee’s editor that he asked her to expand upon it. So, while Watchman was written first, she and her publisher decided to go with Mockingbird, which was actually a prequel.  Lee’s Go Set a Watchman manuscript then got misplaced and she thought it was lost until her attorney found it last year in a “secure location.”

The long-awaited second Lee novel will come out on July 14th and Harper’s publisher (also Harper) will come out with an initial print run of 2,000,000 copies.