My Reading Life

Hearing his first words, listeners will realize why Pat Conroy is the best--possibly the only--narrator for his emotional memoir. He begins with the origins of his lifelong affair with literature--his self-educated mother gave her son a passion for reading and learning. What Conroy and his mother read together would make most avid readers blush in humility. The author is now 66, and his voice has a patina suggested by its seasoned timbre and his soothing reluctance to hurry. Conroy enhances his memoir with a fiction writer's techniques. In his advocacy of fiction, he shares his mother's strong attachment to Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND, a novel that taught him how powerful a fictional work could be when from a master's pen. J.A.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

September 27, 2010
The strengths and weakness of Conroy's novels—both his beguiling narrative voice and his often overly emotional language—are present in this slim paean to the books and book people that have shaped his life. Conroy attributes his love of literature to his mother, who nurtured his passion for reading and at the same time educated herself by studying his school books. "I tremble with gratitude as I honor her name," he writes. Conroy's favorite novel was Gone with the Wind, which his mother read to him when he was five years old, and it made a novelist of him, he asserts. Conroy pays tribute to the men who were substitute father figures and mentors, among them a legendary book rep who chastised him for his "overcaffeinated prose." Breakneck contrasts exist throughout: on the one hand, Conroy sketches concisely the venom of Southern white bigotry; on the other hand, he allows humor to bubble up through dialogue, and riffs the English language. While some readers will not progress beyond the fustian prose, Conroy's legion of fans will doubtlessly bond with the author as he earnestly explores the role of books in providing him with inspiration and solace.