Pat Conroy's Summer Reading as a Youth

Yesterday (7/10/11) I wrote about Parade Magazine’s special issue on summer reading. Today I would like to focus on Pat Conroy’s essay in that issue, “The Sweetest Reading Season.” He writes about how his family would go every summer to stay at his grandmother’s cottage on a lake in North Carolina. (Those of us who have had the good fortune to spend parts of our summers at a cottage on a lake can relate to this.) The summer he was 15, he brought seven substantial, classic books to the cottage. These books had been recommended to him by his Jesuit English teacher, a man who thought that, in Conroy’s words, “literature itself was a form of holy orders and that reading could shape and exalt anyone.” (Isn’t that a beautiful statement?) Conroy read these seven books steadily and with great enjoyment, and then passed them on to his mother and his sister. Then the three of them would discuss the books, often on the deck on the lake, watching the sun go down. Conroy says that to this day, he always carries a carefully selected pile of books with him on vacation. (This careful selection of vacation reading resonates with me, as I have written before, and probably resonates with you as well). Here I would like to give tribute to this English teacher, and to all the many, many other English teachers who have encouraged and inspired young people to read good books. What a great influence these teachers, as well as other teachers and adults in young people’s lives, have had when they have given the gift of the world of books. Oh, and in case you were wondering what the seven books were, here is the list: Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” and Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” We may or may not have chosen that exact list of books, but it is definitely a good one for a start. What a rich, wonderful foundation such books provided for the 15-year-old future writer of "The Great Santini," "The Prince of Tides," and many other books, including the very recent "My Reading Life"!