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I don't know if it's just me or what, but I am not in agreement with most of what is being said against recip links. My opinion on this matter is if the link offers something valuable to your visitors that they will be interested in, then it's not a bad thing.
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Reciprocal links, if not excessive and not obviously manipulative, are fine. Many trusted sites link to each other organically every day. Also the blog patent kinda suggests having a link to your site in the sidebar of a high profile site is a sign of quality.
But many LLs not only have thousands of recips pointing at them but 99.99% of their backlinks are from reciprocal links. I believe a site with a more balanced link profile will perform better.
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this post, Matt Cutts says:
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Reciprocal links by themselves aren't automatically bad, but we've communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking.
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A hypothetical:
Take link list A with 100 reciprocal links, TBPR 1 each. Due to them being reciprocal, Google devalues them by 2%, so those links are really worth TBPR 98 total (I know TBPR 1+1 doesn't add up to 2, but lets pretend they do for a sec. I'm also not saying TBPR = higher ranking; its a metric of inbound juice that hints at how much anchor text and other factors are coming through).
Now the site owner receives 1000 more submissions each link worth TBPR 1. Say Google devalues IBL now at 5%. So instead of 1100 TBPR you got 1045. Still, 1045 is better than 0.
Throw on 10,000 more submits. Say that triggers the "excessive reciprocal link" flag. Devaluation goes up to 60%.
Initially, you see higher and higher rankings, but as you pile on more and more recips, you hit a ceiling - more submits = more devaluation so even if your ranking improves the rate of movement becomes slower and slower.