Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Pat Conroy’s new book, out in November, is a collection of essays. It’s titled My Reading Life, and it includes several whole chapters on books that he says changed his life, including Look Homeward Angel.
From a Charlotte Observer review:
There are other lively, laudatory chapters about single books, notably “War and Peace” and Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel.” Wolfe’s novel, in particular, “took full possession of me in a way no book has before or since.” Conroy rhapsodizes about the effect it had on him, chides himself for spending years parodying Wolfe’s windy style, and concludes that, despite everything, it was from “Look Homeward, Angel” that he took permission to write in his own, “word-haunted” style instead of the pared-down prose of, say, Hemingway. “I owe my life as an artist to [Wolfe],” he writes, “and I will never forget that debt or dismiss his work with my scorn.”
As to the people who influenced him, Conroy writes lovingly about his English teacher, Gene Norris, “who found a profoundly shy and battered young man and changed the course of his life with the extravagant passion he brought to his classroom.” He cites a curmudgeonly school librarian with whom he had an outwardly bristly relationship warmed by an undercurrent of affection. He names an Atlanta bookseller who taught him to value finely made books for their physical beauty as well as for their contents. He writes about a book rep who taught him invaluable lessons about the selling, as opposed to writing, side of the business.
Today, Conroy reads 200 pages nearly every afternoon, still searching “for the fabulous books that will change me utterly” and looking for “all the unappropriated lessons” he can use to improve his own work. One senses behind the brilliance and enthusiasm a large-hearted man still hoping for a kind of spiritual enlightenment he never quite finds in other people’s books. One senses that he comes closest in the hard-won, cathartic act of writing his own.
Thanks to loyal reader Jon for heads-up on this.
