What are you reading?

I read voraciously. I'm a huge fan of H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, James Thurber and Kurt Vonnegut. My secret pleasure is the Harry Potter novels. But lately I have been discovering the great literature I evaded reading in school — Dickens, especially. And a friend on Lana'i gave me his copy of "To Kill a Mockingbird," which I'm halfway through at the moment.

What do you like about Lee's book?

I like the fact that by making the narrator a child, which is of course a technique that Dickens also liked, it creates a perspective where the child observes all kinds of things in the characters so it's up to the reader to read between the lines and figure out what's really going on. Another example is Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," where the beginning is narrated by a character who is mentally retarded and you have to figure it out.

Does reading between the lines about Atticus and Scout give you ideas on how to continue fighting journalism's battles?

I don't usually try to wrest a personal moral out of every book I read; I just let it percolate. But what I do notice is that it's kind of a reminder of things that happen in Hawai'i — people, good people, often stray on the wrong path because they frequently jump to conclusions about what other people do and say. Atticus is a good example of living with aloha; he doesn't jump to conclusions ... and what he finds is that he often is able to find a way to understand another's behavior and find a way to live with it.