Getting the Most Out of Lit and Life

You writers out there must read Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life. I’ve mentioned this before, but it gets even better near the end. A memoir, I suppose it’s called, it has a chapter on Paris that is entirely different from the usual tourist description of a visit there. This one gets under the French skin, if I may coin a venue, not that he writes much about people as he does about unusual food, writing a book there, and his big heroic act in saving a burning man. He doesn’t call himself a hero; rather, he says he’s always been a coward.

You just might fall in love with Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and you’ll get a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, if you’ve never read it before now. Or maybe even if you have read it before.

War and Peace is a tall order. My unfulfilled dream is to have a small reading circle (no more than six persons) read it at the same time, then get together (without a single absenteeism) once a week for a two-hour discussion of it, with coffee and cakes, of course, until everyone in the club has finished it. They would likely continue discussing it the rest of their lives. It is considered the world’s greatest novel and Tolstoy the world’s greatest novelist mainly because of it.

In my collection of DVD’s and videos is a six-hour video of War and Peace in Russian. You don’t have to know Russian to enjoy this film. It is perhaps the most beautiful cinematic production I’ve ever seen. If I had my little reading circle, we could watch it together, ideally, all six hours of it during one day, with a Russian lunch included. But a reading circle like this demands devotion—devotion to the required reading time. Sad to say, most people are too busy for such today. They aren’t getting the most out of life.

But a long version of the film in English does survive. I saw only parts of it many years ago, on PBS, with Audrey Hepburn as one of its many stars. It went on for weeks; seems it might have run three months on Masterpiece Theatre. Conway says on page 280, “If I have one certainty in the world, it is that Adolph Hitler did not read War and Peace before he sent the armies of the Third Reich into the heart of Russia.” And he wonders if George W. Bush read the masterpiece before the invasion of Iraq.

My Reading Life contains much more than what I’ve touched upon here. I suggest you read the little volume of only 337 short pages. Gorgeous prose spurts up on about every page. I shall dip into this one again and again.

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