McMurtry's essays/lit crit/memoir reinvigorates my love of books. Starting with a recollection of reading WalterBenjamin on storytelling in a Texan Dairy Queen, he enkindles my reluctant desire to read Proust, to reread Virginia Woolf, to explore more classics in next year's Reading Challenge. He strikes horror in my chest describing the emotional effects of his open heart surgery in the 1990's. For the first time in four decades, he COULD NOT READ and it lasted over two years before he contentedly picked up a book.
He discusses his family heritage: the myth and reality of cowboys and cattle ranching on the mesquite-snarled prairies of his family grazing land which would have been better served by raising buffalo.
Next I've picked up his volume entitled Books as if I needed to add any titles to my burgeoning To Read list. ( )

A lot of concern decrying the loss of memory after books took over for the oral traditions and took away the storytelling memories. The Greeks and Walter Benjamin, an early 20th century critic both resent this development. From my perspective, the chapter on book scouting makes the book all worthwhile and wading through the other laments, such has there never really being a cowboy for any length of time and that the cattle business was never profitable, largely because ranchers tried to make the European cow work, when it should have been the Mexican cows from the start, at lleast tolerable. McMurtry sums up book scouting in two words, 'the quest'. Composing a great bookstore is a lot like writing a novel. Parts of that I can see, as in patiently curating the right stock, but the anology quickly falls apart in my mind. Although it is easy to conceive the theory that successful scouting rests on an accumulation of knowledge, just as in a novel. It seems that it is still essential to have the Amazon app handy because the values of books I remember from 20, or even 5 years ago, can be easily outdated, usually downward. After all Larry feels that most booksellers are only semi-literate or more precisely specifically literate to the areas where they have chosen to continue to read. To this author reading is knowledge and book dealers have to choose to either read or peddle the books and, of course, they must peddle the books. I can testify to the fact that my reading has increased in both breadth and depth since my retirement some 15 years ago. ( )

Lively and very personal account of growing up in West Texas and the sources of his love of books Very poingant depiction of the hard, austere existence of the earliest pioneers and the contrast with his own obsession with books. Some discouraging views on the role and future of fiction and on the myth of the cowboy ( )

If a book - generates some kind of change or action in me, I give it 5 stars. This book is partly a history of reading - and inspired me to ask Nick to write his history of reading at 60, which he has. (Available upon request.) I, more modestly, wrote my obituary in terms of what I've read.
What books have you read? and why? How does reading and your life intersect? ( )

Larry McMurtry is one of my favorite living novelists, and this set of reflections on literature, the American West, history and his own life is a book I have been recommending since I first read it a few years back. Rereading it with my book club moved me to order a copy, because this is one of the books I want to have in my library. ( )