It's a "classic" for a reason

With the completion of grad school, I find that I am often paralyzed by the choice of which book to read next. What a grand problem to have! After reading Pat Conroy's latest novel, I decided to pick up the classic, "The Prince of Tides." The language was rich and evocative. The narrative was twisted - almost too much so, even for a good novel. The cyclical nature of generational disfunction is impressive, while disturbing. The characters are endearing and unforgettable. Even if you're late to jump on board, I highly suggest you take a ride on the Wingo shrimp boat.

"It was my mother who taught me the souther way of the spirit in its most delicate and intimate forms. My mother believed in the dreams of flowers and animals. Before we went to bed at night as small children, she would reveal to us in her storytelling voice that salmon dreamed of mountain passes and the brown faces of grizzlies hovering over clear rapids. Copperheads, she would say, dreamed of placing their fangs in the shinbones of hunters. Ospreys slept with their feathered, plummeting dreamselves screaming through deep, slow-motion dives toward herring. There were the brute wings of owls in the nightmares of ermine, the downwind approach of timber wolves in the night stillness of elk. But we never knew about her dreams, for my mother kept us strangers to her own interior life. We knew that bees dreamed of roses, that roses dreamed of the pale hands of florists, and that spiders dreamed of luna moths adhered to silver webs. As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensongs of the imagination, but we did not know that mothers dreamed.

Each day she would take us into the forest or garden and invent a name for any animal or flower we passed. A monarch butterfly became an 'orchid-kissing backlegs'; a field of daffodils in April turned into a 'dance of the butter ladies bonneted.' With her attentiveness my mother could turn a walk around the island into a voyage of purest discovery. Her eyes were our keys to the palace of wildness."