Quick Lit: Two Books, 2090 Pages

The last few months I have spent immersed in two enormous westerns, the Pulitzer prize-winning Lonesome Dove (at 850+ pages) and the more recent, weird and wonderful Tom’s Crossing (at 1200+ pages). I kept them in different rooms and read one in the daytime and one at night. While reading I’ve been slowly drafting my own mid-grade western (something I’ve poked at for the last two years). 

Reading these books has been an adventure. I’d describe both of them as epics. (Tom’s Crossing has classical literature references throughout.) Both take their time. Some readers might find the pacing and digressions frustrating, but I like a book with varying rhythms. (I like to write that way too.) Both have great character development and a huge cast of characters. Both have heartbreaking moments and moments of humor. I could imagine the authors enjoying themselves as they wrote, which makes for my favorite kind of book. And both stories have horses named Mouse — a coincidence or not?

So what are they about? Let’s dig in.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

I have wanted to read this book forever and took it along with several other westerns to my writing retreat two years ago. (While there I read first chapters and took notes on style, character, plot, and themes revealed in the books’ beginnings.) This July it was a book club pick — hooray for me!

Lonesome Dove is the story of two former Texas rangers, Call and Gus, who run a livery stable together in a Texas border town called Lonesome Dove. The story takes place in the 1870s. These former lawmen are in the regular habit of stealing and reclaiming horses (and more recently cattle) that have been previously stolen and reclaimed from Mexico. Call is a hard worker of few words. Gus is a loafer and talker. About two hundred pages in, they take a crew of cowboys on a cattle drive to Montana. Before the drive begins, the mayor of Fort Smith, Arkansas (who is also a dentist — I don’t know why, but this little detail humored me) is shot by Jake Spoon, a cowboy who’s taking refuge in Lonesome Dove and is now on the drive. The sheriff, the mayor’s brother, is out to hunt Jake down. There are several secondary stories and characters that thread their way through the cattle drive and many early details that become important later on.

What a book! I’ll never forget it.

Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski

I read about Tom’s Crossing online sometime last year and immediately requested it at my library. By the time I got it this spring, I realized that even with a couple of weeks devoted to serious reading, I wouldn’t be able to finish before the next person on the library list got their turn. So I used my Penguin Random House author discount and ordered myself a copy. (It’s currently on sale at Amazon for $14.99 — far less than the $40 list price.)

Tom’s Crossing is set in October 1982 in Orvop, Utah (a stand in for Provo). It’s about two teens, Tom and Kalin, who commit to rescuing two horses destined for slaughter by the local meat packer, a terrible man / fabulous character named Orwin Porch. But fifty pages in (a very mild spoiler), Tom dies, and Kalin is left to rescue the horses alone…until he runs into Tom’s ghost. There’s murder and characters who are wrongly accused and prominent families and old feuds and an epic journey and (I am not exaggerating) hundreds of characters who over the years comment on the goings on during this week in October. There are several secondary stories and characters that thread their way through Kalin and Tom’s journey and many early details that become important later on.

Coincidently, a book club friend was reading at the same time I was. And when I told my mom about Tom’s Crossing, she downloaded a copy and raced through. 

What a book! I’ll never forget it.

What have you read lately?