The Istoriaphile’s Corner

I have a condition I think of as “The Book Bug.”  Whenever I approach a large collection of books  or I get my hands on a new one, my pulse jumps, my heartbeat quickens and I seem to get  a slight fever.  I’ve had the condition for decades.  It hit me as a kid whenever Scholastic Books distributed their lists of new paperbacks and I was allowed to purchase two. (My attempts to increase the order provided early lessons in negotiation and the Bug returned when the books were delivered.)  The air around books is rarefied to me and I’ve been known to get a book rush when I enter a big library, a good book store or a list of new book reviews.  I’ll probably need a defibrillator if I ever visit the Library of Congress.  Up till now, I’ve assumed I’m the only one with this silly malady and I’ve been too embarrassed to admit it. Thanks to My Reading Life, I now know it’s a condition I share with the writer, Pat Conroy. Conroy is, of course, one of the novelists whose stories are a combination of  imagination and autobiography and he is the first to admit…