Dear Jake,
When I bought The Prince of Tides, you were a little uncertain as to
whether it'd be right for me. You were thinking about the story he
tells, the very southern-ness of it, in light of the thorny, abstruse
nonfiction and poetry that you know I'm fond of. I told you at the time
that I'd been sceptically dismissive of Conroy's work, having an abiding
distrust of best-sellerdom. But then I read his intro to Frank Stitt's
cookbook. I was stunned by the sentences and figured that anybody who
could string a bunch of them together like that was somebody I might
want to spend a little time with. This week I'm taking a reading
vacation, and it seemed like the right time to give it a spin, so I
started it up about 10:00 yesterday morning. Except for a respite for
dinner and a re-watching of "Big Fish" with Lynn (kind of an appropriate
movie under the circumstances), I read straight through until 3:30 this
morning when sleep finally caught up with me. I started up again a
little before 10:00 today and just finished.
Now would you mind just ordering for me everything else the son of a
bitch has ever written?
T Scott
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