My Reading Life
The blurb:
Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is a voracious reader. Starting as a childhood passion that bloomed into a lifelong companion, reading has been Conroy's portal to the world, both to the farthest corners f the globe and to the deepest chambers of the human soul. His interests range widely, from Milton to Tolkien, Philip Roth to Thucydides, encompassing poetry, history, philosophy, and any mesmerizing tale of his native South. He has for years kept notebooks in which he records words and expressions, over time creating a vast reservoir of playful turns of phrase, dazzling flashes of description, and snippets of delightful sound, all just for his love of language. But for Conroy reading is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off-hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that reading may have saved his life -- and if not his life, then surely his sanity.
In My Reading Life
Review:
As I read My Reading Life
In the first 13 chapters, Conroy writes about the people and books that played pivotal roles in his life.
He begins with his mother, how she encouraged his curiosity and love for books. "Books permitted me to embark on dangerous voyages to a world of painted faces of mandrills and leopards scanning the veldt from the high branches of the baobab tree. There was nothing my mother could not bring me from a library...Whenever she opened a new book, she could escape the exhausting life of a mother of seven and enter into cloistered realms forbidden to a woman born among the mean fields of Georgia."
Conroy goes on to describe how Gone With the Wind
In the chapter The Teacher, Conroy shares how his English teacher Gene Norris served as a generous mentor, father figure and friend. In writing about the friendship that began in high school and grew over 40 years, Conroy gently shows us on how to treat other people and to be true to ourselves. Conroy shares how Norris and the censorship of Catcher in the Rye taught him that "Literature teaches us to be brave. It demands it of us." This chapter had me crying in the subway - it's a nod to dedicated and effective teachers everywhere.
In My Reading Life
ISBN-10: 0385533578 - Hardcover $25
Publisher: Nan A. Talese; First Edition edition (November 2, 2010), 325 pages.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
About the Author:
Pat Conroy is the bestselling author of nine previous books: South of Broad, The Lords of Discipline: A Novel
CONTEST DETAILS:
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