The Sweetest Reading SeasonPAT CONROY
JULY 10, 2011
The phrase
“lake lure” has magical connotations in my family’s history. When I was young,
my mother, brothers, sisters, and I would stay in my grandmother’s small
cottage in North Carolina, located on beautiful acreage on a hill above the
lake. There was a long, curling staircase that led down to a boathouse and
dock, where we’d fish. We started our mornings with a swim, then were free to
do whatever we enjoyed.
The summer I was 15, I’d spend the rest of each day reading one of the seven books that Joseph Monte, my gifted English teacher and a Jesuit, had recommended. Mr. Monte was not a frivolous man, but one who thought that literature itself was a form of holy orders and that reading could shape and exalt anyone. “Mr. Conroy, this is a large assignment,” he said when he gave me his list. “But if you read assiduously and seriously, you can easily complete it by the end of the summer.”
12 Great Summer Books
After hours of pleasurable reading, I’d walk down the long staircase again and dive into the cold, healthy waters of Lure for another hour of swimming and goofing off with my brothers and sisters. Sometimes Mom, my younger sister Carol Ann, and I would read on the dock as we watched the littler kids. I felt I traveled the world that summer through Mr. Monte’s novels. Thanks to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, I went to 19th-century Russia to witness the senseless murder of an elderly woman by my first Dostoyevskian psychopath. Next, I was in Victorian England for Dickens’s Great Expectations. When I finished a book, I’d give it to Mom, who’d read it and pass it on to Carol Ann. We shared George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby finished off those heady months.
I remember the way the pages collected the smells of summer. Many times, the paperbacks would end up stained by the suntan lotion we made out of Mercurochrome and baby oil. Wet towels and swimsuits were sometimes tossed on our books, so they’d often be falling apart by the time Carol Ann got to them. Because my sister was a competitive reader of extraordinary gifts, she’d take a novel along with her whenever we went to the local catfish restaurant. That summer, I learned that a book could smell like fried fish.
When my mother, sister, and I gathered on the dock to watch the sun go down, we discussed the books we’d finished. Mom wished she could have been a close friend of Madame Bovary’s, thinking she could’ve prevented her suicide. Carol Ann became a rather fanatical devotee of George Eliot. Both Carol and Mom showed a preference for the women they met in literature; I loved it all.
See What Your Favorite Stars Are Reading
My vacation reading pattern was set in stone that year. To this day, I always carry five or so carefully selected books with me, and I still like to go away with smart, well-read friends who enjoy talking about the books they’ve brought. Time slows down in the summer, and the pleasures of reading are intensified by the rhythms of a rising surf or the pebbled antics of a mountain stream. It is my firm belief that the music of water helps connect me to the rhythms of a writer’s voice.
Since I moved to South Carolina’s Fripp Island in 1993, my days have taken on the dimensions of a lifelong vacation. I swim in the Atlantic twice a day and go for long walks on the beach. I especially like seeing which books the visitors are enjoying. One year, they were all reading Anne Rivers Siddons’s Colony; John Grisham and Stephen King are perennially popular.
These days, my summer reading schedule suffers from the annual invasion of my daughters and their offspring, my frisky and rambunctious grandchildren. But when they’ve ridden off on golf carts to the beach, I retreat to my bedroom to read the stacks of books I’ve saved for those moments. All during the year I hoard volumes that promise intense, fulfilling reading as an escape from the visiting families.
Summer is always a great time to read novels, and my first one this season was The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips. I had no idea what to expect, but shortly after I began reading it on Memorial Day, I realized I’d hit a vein of pure gold. I found myself falling in love with a scoundrelly, untrustworthy father and a sister whom I now think of as one of the greatest in literary history. It looks like it’s going to be a terrific summer.
The summer I was 15, I’d spend the rest of each day reading one of the seven books that Joseph Monte, my gifted English teacher and a Jesuit, had recommended. Mr. Monte was not a frivolous man, but one who thought that literature itself was a form of holy orders and that reading could shape and exalt anyone. “Mr. Conroy, this is a large assignment,” he said when he gave me his list. “But if you read assiduously and seriously, you can easily complete it by the end of the summer.”
12 Great Summer Books
After hours of pleasurable reading, I’d walk down the long staircase again and dive into the cold, healthy waters of Lure for another hour of swimming and goofing off with my brothers and sisters. Sometimes Mom, my younger sister Carol Ann, and I would read on the dock as we watched the littler kids. I felt I traveled the world that summer through Mr. Monte’s novels. Thanks to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, I went to 19th-century Russia to witness the senseless murder of an elderly woman by my first Dostoyevskian psychopath. Next, I was in Victorian England for Dickens’s Great Expectations. When I finished a book, I’d give it to Mom, who’d read it and pass it on to Carol Ann. We shared George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby finished off those heady months.
I remember the way the pages collected the smells of summer. Many times, the paperbacks would end up stained by the suntan lotion we made out of Mercurochrome and baby oil. Wet towels and swimsuits were sometimes tossed on our books, so they’d often be falling apart by the time Carol Ann got to them. Because my sister was a competitive reader of extraordinary gifts, she’d take a novel along with her whenever we went to the local catfish restaurant. That summer, I learned that a book could smell like fried fish.
When my mother, sister, and I gathered on the dock to watch the sun go down, we discussed the books we’d finished. Mom wished she could have been a close friend of Madame Bovary’s, thinking she could’ve prevented her suicide. Carol Ann became a rather fanatical devotee of George Eliot. Both Carol and Mom showed a preference for the women they met in literature; I loved it all.
See What Your Favorite Stars Are Reading
My vacation reading pattern was set in stone that year. To this day, I always carry five or so carefully selected books with me, and I still like to go away with smart, well-read friends who enjoy talking about the books they’ve brought. Time slows down in the summer, and the pleasures of reading are intensified by the rhythms of a rising surf or the pebbled antics of a mountain stream. It is my firm belief that the music of water helps connect me to the rhythms of a writer’s voice.
Since I moved to South Carolina’s Fripp Island in 1993, my days have taken on the dimensions of a lifelong vacation. I swim in the Atlantic twice a day and go for long walks on the beach. I especially like seeing which books the visitors are enjoying. One year, they were all reading Anne Rivers Siddons’s Colony; John Grisham and Stephen King are perennially popular.
These days, my summer reading schedule suffers from the annual invasion of my daughters and their offspring, my frisky and rambunctious grandchildren. But when they’ve ridden off on golf carts to the beach, I retreat to my bedroom to read the stacks of books I’ve saved for those moments. All during the year I hoard volumes that promise intense, fulfilling reading as an escape from the visiting families.
Summer is always a great time to read novels, and my first one this season was The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips. I had no idea what to expect, but shortly after I began reading it on Memorial Day, I realized I’d hit a vein of pure gold. I found myself falling in love with a scoundrelly, untrustworthy father and a sister whom I now think of as one of the greatest in literary history. It looks like it’s going to be a terrific summer.
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