I just finished reading Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life. His prose rolled over me like a big wave and left me dizzy in the way a wave makes you dizzy as it recedes and leaves you teetering behind on the sand.

“I’ve built a city from the books I’ve read,” he writes. “There are thousands of books that go with me everywhere I go. A good book sings a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts and balconies and theaters that thrive within the secret city inside me.”

Say what you will about Conroy’s writing — that his prose tends to purple, for instance — but I have never doubted that he is the real thing, and this book proves it.

“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 a writer’s heart.”