Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Roam on the Range

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

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Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are living legends. As Texas Rangers they cleared the borderlands and made the area safe for white settlers. After that work was done they settled into life as co-owners of the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium, where there days consist of breaking in wild horses and raising cattle. It’s hard work but the men are well-suited to it, especially the preternaturally driven Call. While Augustus might enjoy whiskey and afternoon naps, his talents as a Ranger and a […]

The old west gets fenced in

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry

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This slight and swift-moving novella follows Wyatt Earp and his best bud, Doc Holliday, around an increasingly settled west. In addition to these two main characters, who do little but gamble, drink and very occasionally get into some gunplay, we meet Wyatt’s wife, Jessie, a rancher, Charlie Goodnight, a madam, San Saba, and an intrepid lady reporter, Nellie Courtwright. Several of the other Earp brothers are mentioned but exist mostly off-screen, as impetus for the plot (Virgil become sheriff, Morgan opening a new saloon). McMurtry’s […]

Larry McMurtry duo

Telegraph Days by Larry McMurtry

Loop Group by Larry McMurtry

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CBR13Bingo – Free! (Taking full advantage of the library system to get audiobooks of mediocre books by a writer I like!) Telegraph Days – 3/5 Stars Another of McMurty’s novels that takes on real figures and writes a novel around them. Nellie Courtwright and her brother Jackson have moved to the town of Rio Blanca (near, but not too near Dodge City Kansas) after finding their father dead from an apparent suicide. She’s 22 and her brother is just 17 and they’re the last two […]

Boone’s Lick – Larry McMurtry (2000)

Boone's Lick by Larry McMurtry

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I like when Larry McMurtry writes about the Old West in smaller scopes, even if at the end he tries to broaden that scope out in unsuccessful ways. This short novel begins with a a sheriff visiting a local farmstead and having his horse shot out from under him by the matriarch of the house who, according to her statement, mistook the horse for an elk. The family is hungry and they butcher the horse, so who knows what the truth is. Not our narrator, […]

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas – Larry McMurtry (1968)

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas by Larry McMurtry

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I’ve been slowly making my way through Larry McMurty’s writing for a few years now. So this is the most recent book of his I’ve read, and the book that is closest to his death from this past week. He was in his 80s and lived a fruitful life in a lot of ways. He spent a lot of his life writing books, working in Hollywood, and working in the rare and used book market. His personal views and memoirs are well-documented as well. This […]

All My Friends are Going to be Strangers – Larry McMurtry (1972)

All My Friends are Going to be Strangers by Larry McMurtry

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Part of the Larry McMurtry Houston books, a collection that includes Terms of Endearment and Moving On, this book follows (through the narration of) Danny Deck, novelist and wayward figure who is a kind of shadowy figure in both those other novels. The three novel overlap in incomplete ways, so that they almost tell the same story or same long story in different chunks, with different perspectives. Here, like I said, we have Danny telling his own story as a grad student who gives up […]



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