Malcolm Mitchell is a bookworm.

He was a member of a book club with a group of women in Athens, Georgia, and has authored his own children’s book. Apparently, his book-loving tendencies have helped him learn the Patriots’ complicated offense.

“Later in college, I started doing a lot of reading,” Mitchell told reporters Friday. “So I started understanding the process of how to learn, which definitely helped coming into this situation.

“Any time you start a book — say, a big book, like the fifth ‘Harry Potter.’ Huge. Gigantic. If you think about the end of the book and how long it’s going to take you to get there, you might never start. The first thing you have to do is flip the first page and begin, and that was the same approach I took with learning this playbook.”


In training camp, the Patriots’ fourth-round selection has stood out with a number of strong catches, including a 40-yard bomb from Tom Brady during Friday’s scrimmage. The ‘Harry Potter’ approach seems to be working.