Books, Bookstores and Pat Conroy

I’ve truly been blessed lately with some wonderful books. Not so long ago, I was complaining about the condition of my reading material. Oh, I’ll say I still miss having more Western Historical to read, but I’ve found some great books to fill in with. Last week I read an exceptional book: Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life.

The subject fit right into my last blog. Tastes in books are so personal and it was fascinating to hear about another voracious reader and bibliomaniac. It isn’t well enough for me to just read a book. For me, it is a much more tactile than that. Nothing is as compelling as the smell of an old bookstore, heaped with dusty books. Old books are best, with turned down pages and scribbling in the margins, yellowed paper and dark library-colored covers. Then, there are the paperbacks.
I blame my father, I do. He brought home old books he found at Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City. Books such as King of the Wind, Old Bones, and all of Thornton Burgess’ books. At the time, I was horse crazy and I never met an animal I didn’t like. Later, it was poetry: Emily Dickerson and Sonnets From the Portuguese, incidentally, one of my most prized books because he died soon after he gave it to me and it was the only book he ever inscribed.

Conroy writes of libraries, bookstores, and books with such love and passion. He writes those emotions beautifully, too, his writing style like blue silk velvet. And while his reading was much more diligent and formidable than mine, the sentiment was so like mine when he spoke of what he read. He talked as if reading was a feast, and it is. The best.

I would say I’m much more inclined to read the popular stuff than the classics, but I read what I read with as much zeal and enjoyment. The only classics I’ve read were assigned in school. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy them; I just had to read them. In my off time, I did a lot of reading, unlike most of my friends, but my reading material was most often genre fiction.

My reading material doesn’t shame me though, because I think there is a lot of great writing in all those ‘dime novels.’ Yet, reading Conroy’s book gave me the desire to read a few classics on my own, with no gun in my ribs.

As I use to tell my boys, I don’t care what you read, just read.