• LONESOME DOVE
• by Larry McMurtry
• [rated by pbs readers as #22]
• 858 pages

I just want to say that I am facing one of my biggest fears upon embarking on this journey. I am reading what I have always referred to as my favorite book.

At 858 pages with print I can’t even see without my reading glasses on, will it hold up? What am I talking

about? Will it hold up? Will I hold up is the bigger question.

But my heart is calm. McMurtry is like coming home for me. I have probably read about 25 of his books. I’m ready for the voyage. It is almost the end of September, so I figure it will take me till the end of the year.

I’m sorta looking forward to it.

DONE. AFTER MONTHS.

So. I needn’t have worried about whether I would like the writing or not. It is so achingly beautiful that I’ll love it till the day I die. And though it took me months…I know I will now revisit it again.

When I moved after college in LA to the Hollywood Hills, there was a B Dalton nearby with relatively easy parking (way more important than you’d think). I would look at their special shelves that employees recommended. Now, every book store is filled with that. But then, it was brand new. As I think about it, I found two lifelong literary loves in that first little shelf – David Ritz and Larry McMurtry.

Picking up a slim volume of McMurtry’s called Desert Rose, I instantly felt like I belonged in this writer’s orbit. Who is to say why? Why do I instantly feel at home with McMurtry as opposed to someone else feeling that with Stephen King? Does anybody know that? Are we even allowed to know?

In the introduction, he mentions that he wrote Desert Rose because he was in the middle of this huge book about a cattle drive and he didn’t know what to do with them so he was taking a break.

I fall in love hard. So I went in search of this 900 page book about a cattle drive. Found it. Lonesome Dove. Earned (and richly deserved) the Pulitzer Prize that year. It became my favorite book. Didn’t want to read it again. Hermetically sealed in my heart and brain.

But that was stupid. It is gorgeous writing and I am instantly home again in the verbiage. I don’t think you can explain why you love, but with this man’s writing, it is majesty. Certainly majestic in that its backdrop is the whole, as yet uncorrupted plains of the nation. But also majestic in quietly revealing a shy man’s heart. In allowing for the innocence of these boys and men, based on few of them having any life experience. Till now, anyway.

McMurtry characters are complex, strong, weak, aimless, funny, achingly alone, yearning without knowing what they are yearning for.

Lest you think this a simple book, it is touching, shocking, and so easy to be with.

When you finish the story, the book ends but the majestic reverberations continue. What a beautiful, perfect read.

One last note – though I can’t imagine any other writer that I would want to go on a 3000 mile cattle drive with, even this one was still that journey and it didn’t fit well enough into my mind and life to go fast. So it put my reading goal behind cuz it took a lot of time. But I’m so glad to visit it once again. Whew.

One more last note. McMurtry writes dialogue like none other. Okay. Done now.