As spring turns to summer, newspapers and magazines devote entire sections to books recommendations. Some provide shorts lists and some long reviews. As I peruse these lists, I delight in pondering the book possibilities for this summer.
To add another dimension to this enjoyable endeavor, my husband recently gave me Pat Conroy’s 2010 book, My Reading Life. I have admired Pat Conroy’s since I read his well-known novel The Prince of Tides in the 1980’s. Conroy’s novels draw from his social isolation as a kid moving from military base to military base and the physical and emotional abuse he endured from his fighter pilot dad, Don Conroy. Conroy writes like a poet when he describes a place, he thinks like a psychologist when he writes about people and he transports his readers into his stories with his lyrical prose.
"My Reading Life" is not a work of fiction; rather it is a collection of fifteen essays. Taken together, these essays represent a homily of respect and reverence for the role that novels played in Pat Conroy’s life.
In his first essay, Conroy shares the origins of his obsession with books and the critical contributions they made to his well being. Not to be too Freudian, but his first essay is like a prayer of thanksgiving to his mother, Peg Conroy. He says, “I tremble with gratitude as I honor her name”. He says of his mother, “Novels taught her everything she needed to know about the mysteries and uncertainties of being human.”
Many of the benefits that Conroy ascribes to his mother’s reading life, apply to Conroy as well. Because his family constantly moved and his father terrorized his family, he felt a deep loneliness. Books and libraries became safe places where he could escape the isolation he felt. It wasn’t until he went to high school in Beaufort, South Carolina that he felt some sense of stability. In his essay titled, The City, Conroy states, “At any time, I could take a sudden departure from the fighter pilot’s house and find myself drifting through the tumult of Paris described in a book by Balzac. I could find myself on Whitman’s river-shaped Manhattan or be in Daisy Buchanan’s arms when I woke up with a hangover in the Great Gatsby. I’ve used books to take me on journeys all over the world, to outer space and to forbidden planets beyond.”
In other essays, Conroy acknowledges with gratitude his relationship with a series of father figures that embraced him. First among these men is his beloved English teacher Gene Norris. He says, “Gene Norris didn’t just make his students love books; he made us love the entire world. The world of books was a sacred grove to him.”
He writes about his love of bookstores and collecting books. His shares his experience of teaching literature to African-American kids on Daufuskie Island and writing his novel The Great Santini in Paris. He knew that rigorous reading would improve his writing. Yet his primary motivation for writing was more therapeutic. He says, “Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”
Conroy celebrates dozens of novels and their authors in these essays and offers meaningful musings on their importance to him and to the literary canon. He admires Proust, Balzac, Wolfe, Hemingway, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Dickens and Dickey but in his essay The Count he asserts that War and Peace is the finest novel ever written.
As you consider your own summer reading list, I would recommend My Reading Life. It will inspire you and remind you of the magical, mysterious and mystical moments that can be experienced when reading a compelling novel or this collection of Conroy’s beautiful and wise essays.
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