Reading! ::

I've been meaning to post this for the past few days and I keep forgetting. What's that they say about the memory being the first thing to go? Probably the second! Anyway, I'm a huge Pat Conroy fan and he has a new book being released on August 11th titled "South Of Broad". Given Conroy's history with the low country of South Carolina there should be no surprise that this book is about Charleston. Here's a blurb from Amazon:

An unlikely group of Charlestonian teens forms a friendship in 1969, just as the certainties and verities of southern society are quaked by the social and political forces unleashed earlier in the decade. They come from all walks of life, from the privileged homes of the aristocracy, from an orphanage, from a broken home where an alcoholic mother and her twins live in fear of a murderous father, from the home of public high school’s first black football coach, and from the home of the same school’s principal. The group’s fulcrum, Leopold Bloom King, second son of an ex-nun Joyce scholar, who is also the school’s principal, and a science-teacher father, is just climbing out of childhood mental illness after having discovered his handsome, popular, athletic, scholarly older brother dead from suicide. Over the next two decades, these friends find success in journalism, the bar, law enforcement, music, and Hollywood. Echoing some themes from his earlier novels, Conroy fleshes out the almost impossibly dramatic details of each of the friends’ lives in this vast, intricate story, and he reveals truths about love, lust, classism, racism, religion, and what it means to be shaped by a particular place, be it Charleston, South Carolina, or anywhere else in the U.S. --Mark Knoblauch

Sometime around 1988 I was living and working in Midtown Atlanta during a time when Conroy lived just a couple of blocks away while writing one of his books. I don't remember which book right now, I would have to check the chronology, but I always hoped that I would bump into him at one of the restaurants or watering holes in the neighborhood, but it never happened and, as I recall, he finished the book in Paris.

Hang on for another Pat Conroy anecdote. I used to visit a used book store on Juniper Street in Atlanta called The Old New York Bookstore. It was an old house which had been converted into a bookstore with a pretty eclectic collection of reading material. One day I happened to pick up a Conroy book off a reading table. I don't remember which one, but it may very well have been The Lords Of Discipline. I opened the cover and there was an inscription: "To _____, who wears the ring!" I always wondered how someone could give up a treasure such as that!

Anyway, Amazon is taking pre-orders and you can be sure that I will be in line for this new work from Pat Conroy.