Beach Music to my ears

When's the last time it took you a month to read a book? WAIT. Don't answer that. The real question is, when's the last time it took me a month to read a book? A fairly modern, fiction, popular author, page-turner kind of book.

Not nonfiction. Those sometimes take me years because I have this bad habit of randomly flipping to a page that looks interesting and starting there, reading until I'm bored, then starting somewhere else the next time. Harder to do that with fiction.

Not classics, which I'm trying to "catch up" on so late in life. And I was even an English major in college. I went for as many classes involving modern lit or creative writing as I could get away with. Some of my worst college memories took place in BS&K ... Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Or was it BK&S? Dr. VD, as we fondly called our professor behind his back (Dr. VanDevender to his face), truly cured me of any love I *might* have developed for those three unfortunate fellows.

Now I'm discovering and rediscovering some of the "greats" on my own terms and in my own timing. Currently engrossed in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (because you have to be pretty engrossed to read around the pretty language and find the story!) and I've been working on it about six weeks. I'm all the way to page 71, I believe. On the other hand, I read Kate Chopin's The Awakening before that and finished it in only a day or two. That was some truly fascinating reading. Can't believe I missed that one.

But where was I? Oh, yes. I've finally arrived at the last chapter of Pat Conroy's Beach Music. Yep, the one and same book that went into the emergency tornado basket several weeks back.

Has it taken me a month because it's a horrible, stilted, wordy, incredibly long and boring book that I still insist on finishing? (I have been known to do that. I'm one of those weird people who can't stand to not finish a book, because I've just got to find the redeeming value that allowed it to be published.)

Nope, it's not that. It is incredibly long for commercial fiction (more than 600 pages), although it has a seriously literary bent. But, I can usually read two to four books, three to four hundred pages each in a normal week.

Horrible? NO! Stilted? NO! Wordy. Maybe ... but what beautiful words they are. The thing is, this book has taught me more about different cultures, different eras, different people, different historical events in ONE volume than I might have in my usual 8 or 12 books a month.

This is the only one of Conroy's novels not to have been made into film, I believe. (Hang on, let me go check that out to be sure! I'm back .... I think that's correct.) I completely understand how impossible it would be to make this story into film, and yet one of the subplots is that the characters have been hired to write a mini-series about their story.

It's more like 20 stories in one. And somehow, as different as each is from the others, they all enterwine magically, not creating an episodic feeling (the death knell for the middle grade fiction story I attempted a few years ago), but somehow maintaining a slow, increasing tenstion, building to a conclusion I have yet to read. I've come this far, I don't see how I could possibly be disappointed. Something tells me the conclusion will have turtles.

Twice this weekend, I retold the story of the main characters' experience with a larger-than-life manta ray in a small boat in the open ocean. My husband saw the book lying on the edge of the tub the other day (can't remember why, haven't read in the tub in years!) and I said, "Oh, that book is mesmerizing."

He said, "Beach Music? Sounds like a romance!" I don't read much traditional romance, and he knows it. I flipped it over and showed him the photo of Conroy and said, "Romance? I don't think so. You would even like this book." Then I told the manta ray story.

Told the same story to my son this weekend. I mentioned that what was so crazy about that story was exactly that. It was crazy! But, I raced through the pages, my heart pounding, believing every minute of it.

A string of Holocaust stories runs throughout, and they were so vivid and horrible, I've had to put the book down several times until I had enough energy to pick it up again.

So, what am I saying here? Maybe that you shouldn't wait any longer to read this book, too? (It's already 13 years old, why waste any more time?) Maybe that I hope if you do, you are as mesmerized by this master of metaphor, this king of storytellers? That you won't want to throw it across the room, even if it takes you a month or longer?

I think mainly I want to say this is a book I will be remembering and thinking about for a long, long time. I don't usually review books I haven't even finished yet.