August Read - South of Broad

It is early August here in Northern California.  It is about the time of year when people have quit complaining about the heat and have finally committed to the heat and warm sunny skies.  The yard is starting late summer shriveling from long sunny days and having never quite recovered from the previous drought years.  The side lawn was completely forgotten this summer and remains a wasteland, even the weeds jumped ship to the main lawn of crab grass and everything that survives in a front yard that isn't grass.  The summer makes me feel lazy at times, especially on the days where it is just too hot to run or do anything.  At least on some days that is my excuse.  Today being one of those days.  One of those days where I am not training for a 1/2 marathon and seriously the guilt of not doing so has vanquished for the rest of this day at least.

Late breakfast, naps, no chores... and while I should be dusting and getting the house ready for the week, I decided to blog.   

What am I reading these days?  I can't seem to finish books unless I have a review or blog tour. Which is partially the reason that I like to do them. Accountability... I mean one can't just give up reading????    I am reading a book called Crash and Burn, Lisa Gardner.  It is good, just a bit scary, so I don't read it before bedtime.  I am also making my way through a book called Self Therapy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child...by Jay Early.  It's a self help book, so I am making my way through it, and I say that step by step is the way to make it through the book.  

I have stacks of to-be-read books all around me. I think that comes from a time when I didn't think I'd feel complete if I didn't have books near by with all kinds of choices.  It is amusing as I recollect about that time as I would have NEVER read two-three books at a time.  The days of grieving over a finished book have been long gone.    Now I can sit and read morsels of different books and I am not so driven to even know what is happening next.  It is kind of  like the tv, I will put it on and get episode 2 when I feel like it.  That doesn't bode well for actually finishing books that I start.  Commit Toni Commit!

This afternoon I pulled a book from my bedside table.  South of Broad by Pat Conroy.   I know many of my book blogger friends and associates have read this.    I don't even know what it is about, but I opened the book and started reading and it was like a gourmet reading treat. And I could only wish that Nick Nolte was reading it...to me as he narrated Conroy's other book in movie form. So in my mind he is reading it to me.    It stimulated my mind and I can't wait to get back to it and I suppose that is why I decided to come here to talk about books this Sunday.   

Would anyone care to read with me? Let's check back next month and chat about it. Pretty please.

Biography

Pat Conroy is the author of eight previous books: The Boo, The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music, My Losing Season, and The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life. He lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina. Photo copyright: David G. Spielman

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage” (The Washington Post) by the celebrated author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini

From Publishers Weekly:

Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. In the late '60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's coterie stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator's awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group's love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy's florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat. (Aug.) 

How can you resist that editorial?

Happy August!  Have a great week of peace and love.  #nevergiveup