Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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 […]

Custer – Larry McMurtry (2011)

Custer by Larry McMurtry

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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

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A collection of essays about the “West” in the broadest of terms by Larry McMurtry, published mostly for New Atlantic in the late 1990s. It’s funny because in a lot of ways this is such a pre-9/11 book, a designation I don’t think about much these days, but was of consequence at the time. A lot of American Studies texts in the 1990s, and this book, while not an academic American Studies book, has the flavor and sentiment of one, and references many of the […]

Roads – Larry McMurtry (2000)

Roads by Larry McMurtry

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Within this book, you would find a really stellar reading list of American fiction and nonfiction, something I might put together and add later. This would make this already a worthwhile book. One of my favorite articles from the last few years is a list of lists (of books, to read) pulled from within novels and memoirs not ostensibly about reading books. This includes things like Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman and Jo Walton’s Among Others, both of which list dozens of books read by […]



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