A Remarkable Book about Books

I just finished reading Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life. I actually bought the book at the Blue Bicycle Book Store in Charleston while we were on vacation. Blue Bicycle is a great source for everything Conroy and when I saw this little book (though overpriced) I had to have it. I started it on the beach but heavy philosophy reading assignments kept me from the final third of the book until this week.

Pat Conroy may be my favorite author. I have read all his books except The Boo, and My Losing Season. All of his books are autobiographical. The pain of abuse by his father and the loving care of his bibliophilic and thoroughly southern mother come through on almost every page. This little book is just what the title offers: a delightful tour through those books and authors that have become part of the writing persona of Conroy.

One entire chapter is devoted to his mother’s, and subsequently Pat’s, affection for Gone with the Wind. His mother read the book so often (and at least once a year out loud to Pat) that she would wear out copies and had to buy a new one. Conroy has this to say about the book: “To Southerners like my mother, Gone with the Wind was not just a book: it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance. If you could not defeat the Yankees on the battlefield, then by God, one of your women could rise up 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.”

In another chapter he shares the story of his high school encounter with the school librarian. It is a Catholic school and she was obviously not hired for her knowledge of books. Conroy is sitting in the library reading Hugo’s Les Miserables. He is cross-examined by the librarian as to why he is reading the book, “are you just reading it for the dirty parts?” “I didn’t know it had any dirty parts” responds Conroy. “Well it’s by Frenchman and you just can’t trust them.” At which point she suggests he read a good book about football and promptly gives him a copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (as it so happens, also by Hugo).

The book contains chapters about his favorite used book store in Atlanta (The Old New York Book Shop), which became a meeting spot of local authors and a launching pad for new books by those same authors. We learn about the lifelong impact of his college literature professor and the poetry of James Dickey. If you read this enchanting little book with a notepad and a dictionary by your side, you will end up with an expanded vocabulary and a reading list that goes a long way towards being the Great Books of the English Language. I feel the need for more bookcases!