Hacker News Books

I recently finished Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I highly recommend it, even if you aren’t usually into westerns. I saw it recommended a few weeks ago here on HN and bought it on my Kindle, then kept reading until it was done (stopping only to sleep and work).

Wow, only just found out that LcMurtry has died. Lonesome Dove has had a profound effect on me and still remains one of my favourite books, if not the.

If you haven't read LD I highly recommend it even if you're not a fan of the Frontier setting - it's so much more. When reading it, the picture I got of each character was so vivid that I felt that they were my personal acquaintances. You celebrate when they triumph, and share their pain when they lose. I still think of Gus and Woodrow almost as friends of mine just because of how well I've got to know them and the connection you form throughout reading the book. The overarching story is a rollercoaster of an epic adventure. The only thing that bothers me about it is how it's not a household name.

RIP Larry.

If you have any interest whatsoever in Westerns as a genre you should read Lonesome Dove. It's about 850 pages but I'd be surprised if it took you more than a week to read. For the longest time I had no interest in reading it because, of all the things, the title put me off (I thought it would be a romance of some sort).

His uncles were cowboys toward the end of the cowboy days, and when they were young, they'd heard stories from the old-timers about how things used to be. Those uncles told Larry those stories and he eventually incorporated that knowledge into his westerns, and it really shows. One thing I find fascinating about Lonesome Dove is that, as the article says, he intended it to deconstruct some of the myths of the West and show what a hard life it was, but everyone who reads it falls in love with the world and the characters.

It is sad to see Larry McMurtry has passed on. He was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford 1960-1961 along with my friend, Peter Beagle.

My personal favorite of Larry's books is "Leaving Cheyenne", which plays out three intertwined lives in West Texas during the brief interlude we call the "wild West". While "Lonesome Dove"is an epic novel, "Leaving Cheyenne" is an intense record of love and commitment set against the evolving West Texas backdrop. It is among the few novels I have read more than once.

Try somewhat off-beat American novels:

1. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurty

2. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers

3. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

They are great novels, and sadly, are less known than they should be. If you are into movies, there are great ones like "Paris, Texas" by the German director Wim Wenders, or "A River Runs Through It" by Robert Redford.

Lonesome Dove is the best book you’ll ever read.

If you feel uninterested in reading a western novel, consider that it’s primarily a character drama, and would be just as good if the setting were space pirates or whatever else.

I spent 5 years living near where Mr. McMurtry lived and wrote about - flat and boring as can be, but holy moley did his writing ever romanticize that area’s history effectively.