My Reading Life by Pat Conroy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This love story to reading will prompt you to read more, both of this silver tongued tale spinner and of others. Conroy chronicles his lifelong love affair with the English language: as a student, reader, teacher, and writer. Books are the vessel on which Conroy first escaped a troubled childhood and abusive father, the bullying of officers as a cadet at the Citadel from which he graduated, and at a young age became a national-bestselling author.

He recounts how throughout his life he’s found meaning in words: through his mother's self-education and passion for "Gone With the Wind,” the loving mentorship of Gene Norris, his 9th grade English teacher, the absurdity of Eileen Hunter, the irascible librarian at his Beaufort, South Carolina high school, the rhapsodic detail of author Thomas Wolfe’s, the exactness and purply prose of US Congress Poet Laureate and novelist James Dickey, and so much more.

As you read this book, inspired in Conroy's own journey is perhaps a parallel and more powerful narrative: that of the way in which words have had a similar purport in your own life.

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