Reading in 2023, The Beginning of the Trail

 As I have blogged previously, I’m on the lookout for new genres to read, having abandoned science fiction and fantasy. I have gone back to reading some of the old books I remember reading and enjoying years ago. In addition I have tried a new author from the first half of the last century. There are other authors from that era or a bit earlier that have books that I haven’t read, and which are easily accessible on the Gutenberg website. Tabot Mundy springs to mind, as one such author. There a plenty of H Rider Haggard books I’ve not read as well. And that best selling author, whose name escapes me at the moment…

Nevertheless, I have decided to start my 2023 reading with Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove series. Now I have read some Zane Grey westerns, so these won’t be the first westerns I’ve read, but they will be the rare westerns I’ve read, if I get through them. The reason for this decision is that in my journeys through YouTube’s booktubers, Lonesome Dove has come up several times, mostly as one of the best book everyone had read. So I decided to investigate it.

What I discovered is that while Lonesome Dove is the first book McMurty wrote with these characters, he returned a decade or so later and wrote three more books, two prequels to Lonesome Dove; Dead Man’s Walk, and Comanche Moon, and one sequel, Streets of Laredo with the same main characters. I looked up Dead Man’s Walk on Amazon and read the sample. It seemed pretty good – interesting characters and a touch of humor, which is a requirement for me. And seeing that the series has a 4.8 star rating on Amazon, it would seem that you can’t get better than that. So I decided, what the heck, I’d read the series in chronological order, rather than written order, as that seemed to make the most sense, and well not having read Lonesome Dove when it came out, I could at this late date.

I considered reading library copies, since they are all readily available as paper books. Ebooks, not so much. Lonesome Dove had like a 64 person waiting list. And while the local library is 15 minutes away by car and so no great problem to run down and pick them up, it is winter… and I don’t know how long it will take for me to read each book, so I decided to buy them second hand instead, via Abe Books. Being best sellers in many editions, they were easy to find and I picked up all four for less than $21, including (free) shipping, so they are on their way. Hopefully they will live up to their reputation. Stay tuned.