“Here is what I want from a book, what I demand,
what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I
want everything and nothing less, the full measure of the writer’s heart. I
want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of
poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and for economy of
phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story
and character that I read page after page without thinking of food and drink,
because a writer has possessed me, crazed me with an unappeasable thirst to
know what happens next.”—Pat Conroy, My Reading Life (2010)
