MY READING LIFE

Hearing his first words, listeners will realize why Pat Conroy is the best—possibly the only—narrator for his emotional memoir. He begins with the origins of his lifelong affair with literature—his self-educated mother gave her son a passion for reading and learning. What Conroy and his mother read together would make most avid readers blush in humility. The author is now 66, and his voice has a patina suggested by its seasoned timbre and his soothing reluctance to hurry. Conroy enhances his memoir with a fiction writer’s techniques. In his advocacy of fiction, he shares his mother’s strong attachment to Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND, a novel that taught him how powerful a fictional work could be when from a master’s pen. J.A.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: JANUARY 2011]