Preach it, Mr. Conroy!

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I got to the chapter entitled "A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe," and read the following quote: "The rhythms of his prose style, oceanic and brimming with strange life, infected the way I wrote and thought with an immovable virus I have never been able to shake. It is a well-known fact that I will carefully select four silvery, difficult-to-digest adjectives when one lean, Anglo-Saxon adjective will suffice. [...] Most flaws I have as a man and a writer I can trace directly back to the early influence of Thomas Wolfe: (Conroy 241), Conroy's writing made sense to me.

I have never read any of Conroy's novels, nor have I read anything by Thomas Wolfe, so I had mixed feelings about his (Conroy's) writing style in the first half of the book. His flowery language alternates between feeling dead-on and feeling over the top. A lot of times, it is when he piles on sentence after sentence of the flowery langauge that I get bogged down. I like a few sparse sentences of filler to help my digest the flowers.

Content-wise, I found that My Reading Life has inspired me to go back and read those classics that somehow slipped through the cracks of my reading background. It wasn't until earlier this summer that I read a complete Jane Austen novel, and I'm still making my way through my first Dickens (via audio book). I have yet to tackle Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, but having finished Conroy, I have renewed motivation to try. I know, I know, I should be ashamed to call myself an English teacher.

One of my favorite chapters deals with The Catcher in the Rye, in part because I teach the novel, and in part because he makes a statement about the power of literature and the danger of censorship. Conroy writes: "a great book could do whatever it wanted [...] great books invited argument and disagreement, but ignorance did not even earn a place at the table when ideas where the subject of dispute [...] if [the school board] wanted to ban [The Catcher in the Rye], then the board of education should go ahead and banish all of [the books], because books existed to force people to examine every facet of their lives and beliefs [...] There was nothing to fear in The Catcher in the Rye except the danger of its being censored by people who hadn't read it" (53-54).

Amen, Mr. Conroy. Preach it!

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