My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

[techie]

My Reading Life is a memoir structured around the most pivotal books and literary experiences of Conroy?s life. He starts with his mother?s near-religious yearly rereading of Gone With the Wind, discusses the teacher who first gave him Catcher in the Rye and then asked him to write a letter to the school board arguing for its place in public education, and recalls falling in love with Dickens, Thomas Wolfe, and James Dickey (who was later his teacher.) Conroy recounts meeting Alice Walker, getting kicked out of a poetry workshop by Adrienne Rich, going on the road with a Random House sales rep, and spending a year in Rome with a typist who couldn?t type. And he writes about Atlanta?s now-defunct Old New York Book Shop, where he made the first purchases intended to build his personal library, and about how he has trid to read two hundred pages a day every day since he graduate high school (!!!!), and about the time he spent as a student at the Citadel and as a high school English teacher. Conroy writes about his father?s abusiveness and his mother?s drive to educate herself by reading the same books?every last one of them?he was assigned in high school and college, and he gives credit where it is due, calling out the books and writers who changed his life. AWESOME stuff folks.