Customer Reviews

My Reading Life

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

So I finished "My Reading Life," Pat Conroy's ode to the books (and the book people) that have shaped him. Completed the slim volume in one last gasp, just before 1 a.m., having passed the point of no return, the moment when a book screams "Finish me!" and you obey.

Like my usual time spent with Conroy from Carolina, I left it feeling enraptured, engaged, delighted, and yes, a bit deflated. I'm not sure why.

It made me want to hole up and hibernate for the winter, primed with a plethora of books, to tackle the tomes he loves. Thomas Wolfe and Tolstoy. Balzac. James Dickey. He even suggests another go around with "Gone with the Wind."

I, too, know what it's like to feel the pulse begin to pound at the sight of a used bookstore. I, too, know what it's like when a book grabs you, stabs you, haunts your dreams, rearranges your life. I loved hearing Conroy's version in his curious way.

But the best of the rest was his chapter about Gene Norris, a beloved English teacher who gave a trembling, terrified adolescent a gift he could never quite repay. Norris taught him, yes. He gave him books, indeed. But he drove him to the Wolfe boardinghouse in Asheville. He took Pat to meet a poet. He saw a spark and ignited an inferno.

In a way, "My Reading Life" is almost elegiac. He laments being born in the century in which novels lost their stories, music lost its melody, art lots its form. He says he read something claiming that paper-printed books will be obsolete in two years.

Maybe, maybe not. But I get his point. We no longer live in a literary age. Sound bites have made us spastic. Can't sit still. No time for stories. No time for depth.

We're a worse nation for it. Cheers to Pat Conroy for championing another, better way.

I left work today and went directly to Borders to buy this book. I couldn't wait to read it and I wasn't disappointed. Its wonderful. A touching memoir of the role that great books have played in the author's life. I will stand on the coffee tables of Philip Roth or John Irving or Tom Wolfe in my muddy work boots and tell them all the same thing: Pat Conroy is the greatest living American author.

Pat Conroy has written a book that may be his best yet. His talent as a story-teller has been well known to millions, and in this jewel of a book he polishes his art until it becomes mirror-like, where every reader is likely to see reflected back something in his or her experience that will make them laugh or cry out loud. Pat describes, as only he can, the highs and lows, loves and foibles of a real human being who has not only lived life to the fullest, but has thought deeply about that life. Because he is so well read, he can bring context to the role of literature. Each vignette makes its own compelling case for the essential need to read, as widely and deeply as we can. Beginning with "The Lily," his mother's early influence, he takes us on journey that careens through Thomas Wolfe, James Dickey, Leo Tolstoy, and Margaret Mitchell. Alice Walker will not like this book, for reasons described with Pat's hilarious and harpoon-like wit. But unless you happen to be Alice Walker, you'll love it.

Let me start by saying that I have not read any of Mr. Conroy's previous books. I was drawn to this book by its title as I enjoy books that describe how various authors and their writings have impacted the life of an individual. Although there is some of that here, this book is primarily a series of stand-alone autobiographical sketches that introduce the reader to several defining moments in Mr. Conroy's life as well as to some rather interesting characters who had a profound impact on the author's life. Chief among them is Mr. Gene Norris, an English teacher who played a significant role in Mr. Conroy's life as a writer. Mr. Conroy's tribute to this gentleman is very touching and something I wish every teacher could read. Finally, at least five of the chapters in this book were previously published elsewhere. I mention this because it is consistent with my sense that this book is less about Mr. Conroy's reading life per se and more a cobbled together selection of brief sketches that highlight some major themes in his life, themes that speak more to his writing life than to his reading life. As such, it was not what I was looking for but I'm quite certain that Mr. Conroy's many fans will find it an interesting and informative read nonetheless.

In the South, women like to declare --- about the neighbor's new baby, their favorite reality show star, or a child they see in the supermarket checkout line --- "Oh, I could just eat him with a spoon!" This exuberantly cannibalistic sentiment expresses my feeling for the writing of Pat Conroy. I could just eat it with a spoon, and much as he himself once wanted not merely to study and worship Thomas Wolfe, but to be him, young writers could do worse than to ingest and become Pat Conroy. Through his reading choices over a lifetime of enjoying and producing literature, this new book reveals the private Conroy, the one who grew up in a now famously public dysfunctional family, the one who learned to be a man not from his brutal military father but from his refined, protective, shell-shocked mother.

When he picks up a book, Conroy says, "I want everything and nothing less."

The thing I like best about MY READING LIFE is Conroy's gutsy willingness to champion books and writers who have been royally panned by the critics over the years. First and foremost, for us Southern readers, is Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND. "According to Margaret Mitchell, the Civil War destroyed a civilization of unsurpassable amenity, chivalry, and grace....If you could not defeat the Yankees on the battlefield, then by God, one of your women could rise from the ashes of humiliation to write more powerfully than the enemy and all the historians and novelists who sang the praises of the Union." Conroy's mother took him to the sites sacred to this huge and hugely successful novel, in Atlanta and elsewhere, and between them they parsed the universe according to Mitchell's view of a proud but defeated land and a determined, if not precisely moral, heroine. It is through their shared admiration for Mitchell's book that Conroy came to understand that women need an Ashley Wilkes more than they need a Rhett Butler. This was an important message for a boy whose role model of husband and father was "The Great Santini," who emotionally and physically abused his family.

The other author Conroy joyously affirms is North Carolina's literary lovechild, Thomas Wolfe. He was so smitten with Wolfe that his kindly English teacher/mentor took him to the Wolfe home in Asheville, where the young man could see the reality of the writer's work through the physical confines he inhabited. He read into LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL parallels to his own life: his longing to become a great writer and his need to exorcise the demons of his childhood, symbolized for Wolfe by a father who carved stones for the dead, and for Conroy by a father who flew planes for the military with intent to kill. Conroy recognizes and acknowledges Wolfe's flaws, his plethora of words where a few might do, but he declares, "Wolfe takes you high up into the mountains, past the tree line, to those crests and snowy peaks of the highest points on earth. He stammers, he murmurs, he hunts for the right words, and words spill out of his pockets and cuffs and shirtsleeves as he tries to awaken us from the dream of our own barely-lived lives."

Conroy hits a lick at the undeniably classic as well: "Once you plunge into the inexhaustible depths of WAR AND PEACE, Count Tolstoy will take you prisoner for more than thirteen hundred pages." He read Victor Hugo's immortal LES MISERABLES while in high school. He studied with James Dickey, poet and author of DELIVERANCE: "So emotional was I about his work, I had to issue commands to myself not to genuflect and kiss his hand if we ever met." Conroy speculates that Dickey's work will not prove immortal, however, suggesting that political correctness will silence "the voices of writers like James Dickey across the land." He credits his teachers and mentors, including the contrarian librarian of his young years who drove him to read more and more by her scorn for his boyish zeal and her apparent total lack of understanding of the books she was charged with caring for.

In the chapter called "Why I Write," Conroy tells us, "I have always taken a child's joy in the painterly loveliness of the English language. As a writer, I try to make that language pitch and roll, soar above the Eastern Flyway, reverse its field at will, howl and reel in the darkness, bellow when frightened, and pray when it approaches the eminence or divinity of nature itself." In my humble opinion, he has succeeded, many times over.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

If you have read any of Pat Conroy's works, but especially the Prince of Tides, you know what a gifted writer this man is. As they say, he is the real thing. His ability to turn a phrase, to tease out the exact emotion he is looking for and then take that feeling and rework it, and get right down into your gut is extraordinary. In this partial autobiography he takes us the reader on a literary tour of the world of the mind, as explored though the books he has read. From poetry, and philosophy through history, you realize the deep importance that books have had on his intellectual development, and just maybe in his words - his sanity.

These are the people, the places, the experiences that he has gone through, that have molded him into one of the truly gifted writers of his generation. Could it have been different? The answer is of course it could have, but by reading Tolkien, and Milton, and the Greek historian Thucydides, he had to turn out the way he did. His love of language was developed through the written word, and if you were to go into his house today in the South, you would discover something very interesting.

You would find a set of notebooks that he has kept all these years written in his hand. When he would find an interesting phrase, he would write it down. Whether it was a description, or even words about a sound, his love of language would dictate that somehow he needed to write it down, and then play with it. After doing this for years, when he became a writer, Conroy had a deep reservoir of language, and phrasings that he could apply to his own work. He would keep going back to those notebooks.

There is honesty in this book on every page, and there is wisdom. In every utterance you feel what some writers have referred to as the power of books to help shape a human life. In the case of a writer, this shaping is then reflected back in the written word that becomes his book. We still know however, that no matter how much we read, and Conroy says it much better when he contemplates that if he could read a million books, he would still find himself to be a mediocre thinker. There is just so much to read. I found that the three most interesting chapters in the book were:

Gone with the Wind (Chapter 2)
Conroy's mother reads the masterpiece to her son every night beginning at age five, and the boy finds himself transformed by the words.

The Old New York Book Shop (Chapter 6)
It's not in New York by the way. There are shelves of books and Conroy wonders just how long each of those books can sit on a shelf, just waiting to transform the person that is going to pick them up, for books are living things and they have the power to change us.

Why I write (Chapter 14)
If you have ever thought about what are the different rituals that an author must go through to be able to pick himself up and sit down and write, then this chapter is for you. Each author is different in his technique, but many experience writer's block, some just go at it. Conroy requires a special location to get going. It is a very interesting chapter, and be sure not to miss it.

CONCLUSION:

This book is physically smaller than most books, and it fits nicely in the palm of your hand. The pages are referred to as deckle edging which has a nice feel to it, and the font made it easily readable. I read it while on an airplane, and as I flew, time flew with me. That is the power of a great book. It has the ability to make you escape time, and be absorbed into what the author is conveying to each of us, and for each it is different. I gladly gave this book five stars and wish there were more like it. Order it today, and thank you for reading this review.

Richard C. Stoyeck

Pat Conroy fans, this one is for you. Longtime readers of Conroy's fiction have often wondered why so many years pass between new books, how much truth is really contained in his novels, how his family reacts about seeing themselves in his novels, and whether Conroy's abuse at the hands of his father has had a long term impact on his head. In My Reading Life, Conroy answers all of those questions - and many more.

According to Conroy, reading saved his life. Books were his escape from the harsh realities of growing up in a family headed by the kind of brute his father was. They kept him sane by showing him what was possible. The first reader in his life was his mother, a woman who very literally educated herself with books from the public library topped off by her son's schoolbooks. She did the reading - and the study assignments - because she wanted to master what she had been forced to miss as a young woman

The first time Mrs. Conroy read Gone to the Wind to Pat, he was only five years old. She read it to him so many times (yearly) that it became an intimate part of their mother-son relationship and Conroy credits the experience with making him the novelist he is today.

"I became a novelist because of Gone with the Wind, or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a `Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word `Southern,' because Gone with the Wind set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl in Atlanta, and it was the one fire of her bruised, fragmented youth that never went out."

Conroy's mother was his first influence, but she would not be the only mentor in his life. Pat, knowing that he did not want to become a man that even remotely resembled the man his father was, searched for an alternative role model. To his great relief, he finally found that man in a Beaufort High School classroom. English teacher Gene Norris would become such a positive force in Pat Conroy's life that their relationship would last for decades.

"Though Gene couldn't have survived a fistfight with any of the marines I had met, I knew I was in the presence of the exceptional and scrupulous man I'd been searching for my whole life. The certainty of his gentleness was like a clear shot of sunshine to me. I had met a great man, at last."

Gene Norris would encourage and challenge Pat Conroy in ways that would make him a better writer - and, more importantly, a better man - than he might have been if the two had never crossed paths.

My Reading Life is filled with Pat Conroy's memories. It is a clearly marked roadmap of the life path taken by one of America's most beloved writers. It is both personal and frank in its approach, and it will certainly please those readers already familiar with Conroy's novels and nonfiction work. And readers for whom My Reading Life is their first exposure to Pat Conroy, will almost certainly want to see what they have been missing for the past few decades.

Personally I will remember My Reading Life best because of all the wonderful, bookish quotes it encompasses. This is one of my favorites:

"Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touchthem as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart."

Yes.

I lost the love of my life 5 months ago. In my loneliness I stopped by the central library last week looking for something to read. All I saw were political books and business books that I had no interest in except for this little book. You see my wife had brought home a copy of a magazine called "Guns and Gardens" years ago and there was a story about Pat and his newest book. Since we spent a week in Charleston I noticed he was writing a book about this great city we loved ( we stayed at the Sword Gate Inn ). Anyway I never forgot Pat Conroy.

I brought the book home and read it quickly in a couple of nights. My wife loved Thomas Wolfe and we stayed right next to the home and toured it the next day. We saw Gone with the Wind ( our favorite movie ) at the Orpheum here in Memphis and bought a brick from the Theater in Atlanta were it premiered. We spent a week in Paris and loved it as we would sleep until 10 or 11 every morning since we stayed out like Pat did every night and did many of the same things. It took me 5 years to talk her into merrying me ( I'm an Engineer ) but we liked so many of the same things. She was a French teacher with her Master in French Literature and had PHD potential.Over the last months people have asked me to come to grief meetings. I wonder if his french teacher in the book could have been my wife if I hadn't convinced her to merry me. Thanks Pat for your book. Now I know the last 37 years were worth it. Your book was my grief book.
P.S. She was an army brat and lived all over the world like you. Robert Nolen Memphis

First - To establish my street cred as a voracious reader: I have over 600 books on my Kindle (ranging from Lord of the Rings to a free Cuban cookbook.) Let me say up front that I believe "The Prince of Tides" is the best "Southern" novel ever written. AND that I believe that "story" is ALL. AND that being invited into Mr. Conroy's reading and writing universe was a privilege and an eye-opener. Let me also say that I have now ordered the 12 volume set (in 4 movements - slightly used) of Dance to the Music of Time (my woefully ignorant self having missed these works entirely.) I'm looking forward to the cold winter January/February long haul passing much faster when these arrive.

What stands out in the book:
(1) Mr. Conroy's mother reading all of his literature textbooks as he brought them home.
(2) Alice Walker's knee-jerk response to a Southern white male - ANY Southern white male.
(3) The hilarious trip down the Chatooga.
(4) The descriptions of food in Paris.
(5) The amazing English teacher who introduced Mr. Conroy to Archibald Rutledge as a lesson in how you treat aspriing young writers.
(6) The Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta. Why oh why is it gone???
(7) Mr. Conroy READS at least 200 pages a day.

Although I am a Kindle junkie - I DO love a real live book. (This one even has deckled edges and a sewn binding.) It's a keeper. Plus...my son stood in line to get it autographed for me by Mr. Conroy. "To Patricia Chandler: For the love of words, books and story. All praise to your reading. Merry Christmas. Pat Conroy"

What more could I ask?
ps Please don't tell Mr. Conroy that my only experience thus far with "War and Peace" was a Cliff Notes version. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

This book is a perfect microcosm of Pat Conroy's works. There are times it is soaring and powerfully brilliant and beautiful. And there are times when the text is verbose and too florid and leaves the reader shaking their head at Mr. Conroy's insistence at writing such unnecessarily extravagant prose. The great thing about Pat Conroy is that he sees and admits to this flaw in himself, and does it anyway. Take it or leave it. With that choice, I guess I'll take it.
"My Reading Life" is a collection of fifteen essays that almost serve as a mini memoir for Mr. Conroy. The book begins with two of the strongest essays in this text, and its ends with the other two strongest. Those bookends guarantee the reader a pleasurable experience. However, some of the middle essays I found a little lacking and the fault is not the writing. I was just not as interested in their content, and they seemed to lack the "fire" that Mr. Conroy insists is necessary for great writing. They were still quite good, and the text as a whole is necessary reading for serious writers.
I know some readers have taken issue with the "whininess" of Mr. Conroy, and others have blasted his smugness. I actually think both of these qualities add to the text. One cannot read "My Reading Life" and not come away with the very real sense that Mr. Conroy is one of them. I could imagine myself living next to this guy, and I think some readers don't like their authors to be so "human". I for one am glad that he is.
This is an enjoyable text, with some absolutely brilliant nuggets dispersed throughout. There are sentences about reading, and writing, and their value in our modern life that made me shake with their profundity and power. I also love the fact that Mr. Conroy is a forceful advocate for the "story" in literature and laments quite accurately about its demise in our postmodern age. His defense of this most ancient of arts ("tell me a story") is something I cling to. May other writers also pick up the battle cry!