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Published Nov 2010
352 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is also a voracious reader. He has for years kept a notebook in which he notes words or phrases, just from a love of language. But reading for him is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off-hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that reading has saved his life, and if not his life then surely his sanity.
In My Reading Life, Conroy revisits a life of passionate reading. He includes wonderful anecdotes from his school days, moving accounts of how reading pulled him through dark times, and even lists of books that particularly influenced him at various stages of his life, including grammar school, high school, and college. Readers will be enchanted with his ruminations on reading and books, and want to own and share this perfect gift book for the holidays. And, come graduation time, My Reading Life will establish itself as a perennial favorite, as did Dr. Seuss's Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
"What a delightful little book ...with a punch far sturdier than its compact size might suggest...try to resist rereading it!" - Booklist
"Timely as well as timeless...Elegant, evocative, and elegaic." - Boston Globe
"The 15 essays in My Reading Life should delight curious readers.... [Conroy] is fun to read and debate." - USA Today
"Pat Conroy doesn't just love books, he devours them. He doesn't just visit libraries and bookstores, he inhabits them. He doesn't enjoy language, he revels in it... [My Reading Life] is a rich, unabashedly self-critical and moving tribute to a writer's passion...Like Stephen King did in his remarkable On Writing, Conroy reminds us of his considerable talents for telling a story and arranging words." - Associated Press
"In this marvelous blueprint for how to engage with all things literary, the goal is not only to get wet, but to fall deeply and madly in over our heads. With its heady mix of memoir, advice and out-and-out lust for the written word, My Reading Life asks how we could possibly settle for anything less." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"[Conroy's] fans will savor these 15 essays on the books and people that helped shape his long writing career....They lend themselves to being taken up separately, at leisure, and savored like a rich dessert." - The Charlotte Observer
"My Reading Life extols the glories of books [and] offers heartfelt thanks to those who encouraged a passion that led [Conroy] to writing." - The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
"Conroy's legion of fans will doubtlessly bond with the author as he explores the role of books in providing him with inspiration and solace." - Publishers Weekly
"From time's bookshelf, Conroy selects some arresting volumes and some dusty duds better left alone." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about My Reading Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: David G. Spielman
Pat Conroy, born in Atlanta in 1945, was the first of seven children of a young career military officer from Chicago and a Southern beauty from Alabama, whom Pat often credited for his love of language. The Conroys moved frequently to military bases throughout the South, with Conroy eventually attending The Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina, where, as a student, he published his first book, The Boo, a tribute to a beloved teacher. Following graduation, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, where he met and married a young mother of two children who had been widowed during the Vietnam War.
He soon took a job teaching underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina shore but, after a year, was fired for his unconventional ...
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