Larry McMurtry

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Larry McMurtry duo

Telegraph Days by Larry McMurtry

Loop Group by Larry McMurtry

July 17, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

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

April 14, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

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

March 29, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

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

January 20, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

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 […]

Custer – Larry McMurtry (2011)

Custer by Larry McMurtry

January 19, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This book is just…not great. The issue comes from the fact that while Larry McMurtry knows a lot, and knows how to tell a great story, he’s not a scholar, not a historian, and gives way to a reproduction to cheap short cuts in his nonfiction too often. He tells you in no uncertain terms that a better, more fully realized, and more accurate and better researched book already exists: Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell. I can’t speak to that book yet, […]

Sacagawea’s Nickname – Larry McMurtry (2001)

Sacagawea's Nickname by Larry McMurtry