Redheaded Reviews: My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

This unusual book really is about reading books and a bit about writing them as well. Some of the chapters are entitled: Gone With the Wind (how his mother introduced him to this book as a young kid); The Teacher (about his high school English teacher who guided him through reading); Charles Dickens and Daufuskie Island (the last place he worked as a teacher for some illiterate black islanders off the coast of South Carolina for a year and their version of A Christmas Carol); The Old New York Book Shop (a used bookstore in Atlanta that he discovered in the 1970s and began his book collection with them); On Being a Military Brat; A Southerner in Paris (writing his novel in Paris); A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe (his obsession with the author); The Count (his obsession with War and Peace); My Teacher, James Dickey (taking a class under the author), and the essay Why I write.

His high school English teacher, Gene Norris, was like a father-figure to him. He also helped to guide him on his reading journies. The two would take weekend trips together to go antiquing or to meet the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, which in today's light would be deemed highly inappropriate. Nonetheless, the trips and the extra attention Norris paid to Conroy and to other kids over the years helped to save them. He sounds like he was an extraordinary man, though perhaps, an odd one.

In the essay The Old New York Book Shop, he talks about the used bookstore that he walked past for the longest time in Atlanta on his way to the office he rented to write his novel out of. Until one day he stumbled into it and began buying up books like a fiend. His bookshelf at home pretty much only held textbooks from college. Soon he was getting more bookshelves. He became friends with the owner Cliff Graubart a transplanted New Yorker. He was in there all the time and knew the collection as well as Cliff and helped him to better arrange it since Cliff knew little about literature but a lot about the business end of rare books which he also sold. The bookstore would become a place for other writers to hang out and have launch parties for their books. It was THE place to be in the literary world of the area. Sadly, it closed twenty years ago.

I had trouble reading this book because Conroy's giant ego and what is known as "purple prose" got in the way. Basically, he just wrote so puffed up and went on and on and you wondered if he was ever going to get to a point in your lifetime. But a couple of them were good such as the two I just mentioned and I personally liked the one on Gone With the Wind because I enjoyed that book as a child. Overall, I cannot fully recommend reading this book. Parts were good to read, but at least half of it wasn't worth it.

Quotes

Books contained powerful amulets that could lead to paths of certain wisdom. Novels taught her everything she needed to know about the mysteries and uncertainties of being human. She was sure that if she could find the right book, it would reveal what was necessary for her to become a woman of substance and parts.

-Pat Conroy (My Reading Life p 5)

In the vast repository of language, the poets never shout at you when you pass them by. Thiers is a seductive, meditative art. They hand you a file to cut your way out from any prison of misrule.

-Pat Conroy (My Reading Life p 140)