My ex gave me this book with written notes in the margins of the book. He started reading it, anyway, and gave up. I've read that it is supposedly "slow" in the beginning, but I didn't feel that way. It's exactly the kind of directly into the psyche style of writing I crave the most (if the change in perspectives took time to get used to, ultimately it was complimentary of the other). I'm gonna have to buy a fresh copy... Okay, some people thought that The Wire was a slow burn and I never did. I More...

I was only willing to read this book because a friend told me I had to. When I was thirty pages into it and complaining to him about being unable to handle any more discussion about horses and beans, he made me a bet: If I got to page 101 (out of 900, mind you) and I still didn't enjoy it, he'd take me out to dinner at any restaurant I wanted in New York City. If at page 101 I had warmed up to it, I had to finish. I don't think I made it past the 60th page before I knew I had "lost" the bet.

The More...

The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.

During a recent trip to the local bookstore, a discount stack of Lonesome Dove caught my distracted eye. Picking up a copy, I randomly flipped through to read three separate passages. And like an amnesiac, I promptly forgot all about the books I sought to find in the first place. Because this here was the book I didn’t know I needed to read right now.

At its core is a simple enough story—an epic cattle drive, not long after the Civil More...

HEADLINE: Where do we place Lonesome Dove and Gone With the Wind within the American Canon?




Who gives a damn? Really. What do we care? Here is what we do with Lonesome Dove and Gone With the Wind. We read them.

Half way through Lonesome Dove Augustus McCrae rides into the breaks of the Canadian River. He is tracking Blue Duck who has kidnapped Lorena. He comes upon an old adversary, Aus Frank, a former mountain man and ineffectual bank robber, in the middle of nowhere. Aus is collecting buffalo bo More...

My favorite book of all time and the best book ever written in the English language. It was so engrossing and the characters so compelling and the adventures so entertaining, that I wanted to read it in one sitting. It's one of those reads that I envy others who have yet to read it.

Gus and Call are two of the most memorable characters in American fiction. They are the yin & yang of cowboys: one caring and comical, the other cold and unemotional.

Blue Duck is one of the most evil characters I More...

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

This is an epic novel, and the quotation by T.K. Whipple which I provided above is indeed an appropriate epigraph. It's interesting that Larry McMurty originally devised it as a More...

Now this is a book. It's so good it hurts.
The snake part!?! Holy crap! I'm not aware of having experienced a more vivid moment in a book ever.
Everyone should read this book. EVERYONE! I don't give a goddamn that it's 900some pages and you already saw the miniseries with Ricky Shroeder. You still have to read it. If you love to read and you haven't read this book then you're cheating the fuck out of yourself. GET ON IT!

This is one of my favoritest books ever. In fact, put a gun to my head and tell me to pick just one as my all time fave, it’d be better than even money that Lonesome Dove would be the one I’d name.

It has the bonus of not only being an incredible book but of having an excellent companion piece in the television miniseries based on it. That’s one of the great all-time fusions of print and film. I can’t read this without hearing the voices of Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Anjelica Huston, Chris More...

This book completely ravaged me. I didn't expect to fall in love with Gus, but dammit if I did anyway. McMurtry dragged me through every mud hole, snake pit, camp fire and stampede his characters endured. I felt every cactus prickle and tasted the beans and bad coffee. Who knew I could love the West so damn much?

Next to The Three Musketeers, this is the best man-love story around. Gus and Call are totally OTP 4evah.

I won't spoiler the story for anyone here... but there's a place in the book wher More...

Just finished this beast. All 945 pages of it. I'm trying hard not to overstate my love for this book since I just finished it and I suppose its possible that some of the shine could rub off of this in the coming months. But for right now, Lonesome Dove is the best thing I've read all year and it might be my favorite book of all time. Okay, so I'm not trying hard enough apparently.

Having read Last Picture Show and now this, I can say that I am totally enamored of McMurtry's style. His deepest gi More...

This review most probably won't do justice to this novel, but it'll have to do. Previous to this, the only thing that I've read that I'd consider a western is Dances With Wolves. Being a movie/DVD buff, I do have quite a bit of knowledge of the genre as I am a fan of western films, but for some reason, I have never been pulled into reading them.

Lonesome Dove was a natural choice for me. Having loved the mini-series, I picked up the book at a book sale some time ago in anticipation of finding the More...

I've spent a great deal of time trying analyze my love for this novel and I really can't pin it down or write about it in any coherent way. It's a big fat rambling epic about a cattle drive with a cast of mostly male characters. I don't like big fat epics, I don't like rambling and I certainly don't like macho-type novels. But I love this book - loved it when I read it twenty-something years ago, and reading it again was like revisiting an old, beloved friend - my very favorite kind of reading e More...

This book definitely earned its place as an epic classic.
It is that good! And it only keeps getting better and better and better and better. Really.

The first thing the author manages brilliantly is recreating the atmosphere and the feel of that period, so that even I as a 21st century European can transfer myself into 19th century America. I can imagine what it looks like, how it feels and how people go about their business.
This book is not a western. Or at least not what i associate with wester More...

I never thought I would enjoy this book quite as much as I did. It is/was so far away from my comfort zone but has turned out to be one of the most accomplished books I have ever read. The book is full of people looking for something. Love, fulfilment, adventure, friends, reason, peace. They waste a lot of time and loose lives making the wrong decisions. A simple description would say that Lonesome Dove is an epic cowboy adventure. Epic in more ways than one, the .epub file is 1400+ pages long b More...

GRAND! Just abso-fooking-lutely grand from start to finish.

Thanks, Broadway street-book dude. Cowboys telling fart jokes and falling in love with sullen whores are EXACTLY what I want to read about right now.




Warning: This book will destroy you. I have never been so completely and utterly decimated by a novel. I don't need a book club; I need a support group.


On a side note: Maybe these are fightin' words, and I only ever read Blood Meridian, but I'll take McMurtry over McCarthy any day of the week. No Faulknerian pretensions, no torture-porn, no dogged More...

I started Lonesome Dove based on a recommendation and a desire to read something very lengthy, and not by Stephen King. McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize Winner delivers 100%,

and that is just the percent that I got the first time through. To my surprise, Lonesome Dove was a western, a genre with which I am not that familiar other than a

novel by Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour each. Most seem to be rather short though but this book is 990 pages (judging by the paperback version) and every one of those

page More...

I read this book in the early 1990s. I managed to finish this book, but it left me feeling squicky. I had no problem with the sex scenes, it's the weird words they use to describe things - like "carrot" - that really just bothered me. What amuses me the most about this book is that many people who are otherwise really prudish about these things have told me they loved this book (like my late mother, who also burned a copy of The Happy Hooker she found once she realized what it was about. Really, More...

O BABY BABY. I went crazy for this book; it changed my entire vernacular. Penises are now referred to only as "old carrots," and having sex is only called "poking." Not to mention the fact that I now wear chaps and drink nothing but whisky. The cowboy life is my dream fantasy life; even with all of the injuries and general poor health. Never brush your teeth! Prostitution as a fine career endeavor!

One of my favorite epics; the characters are beautifully developed even in their own simplicity. O More...

This probably wouldnt have been a 5 if it was shorter, funnily enough. But I feel like Ive been reading it so dern long that it earns itself another stripe just by familiarity. Its so nice when you've been in the same territory with a big long book for a while and it feels comforting to pick up and slip back in with the characters and plot with ease. I think you really feel your on the journey with them across the wide open spaces and going through their trials and tribulations. I loved Gus and More...

This review was written in the late nineties (just for myself), and it was buried in amongst my things until today, when I uncovered the journal it was written in. I have transcribed it verbatim (although square brackets indicate some additional information for readability) from all those years ago. It is one of my lost reviews.

My favourite thing about Lonesome Dove was Augustus McCrae. He was the cowboy embodiement of Denholm, which predetermined that I would love Gus. Reading Lonesome Dove was More...

This is a hard book to review. Lonesome Dove is not a "story" like a traditional story with a beginning, middle, climax, and end. It's more like you are riding along in these people's lives for a while, until you turn up the trail on your own.

This isn't a spaghetti western with good guys trying to find the black hats so they can "head them off at the pass." It's also not about one of the great legends of the old west like Doc Holiday or Billy the Kid.

It's simply the telling of a time in the life More...

I remember when I decided to read this book. Prior to this, I don't think that I would have ever decided to pick up a true Western. I might have considered watching one if I was really bored or it had extremely good ratings, but even then I would hesitate.
Anyway, I was lifeguarding and asking the usual "What are you reading?" to sunbathers so I could have something besides the hot sun to ponder on. This girl engrossed in her book answered with Lonesome Dove and couldn't stop raving about it. I t More...

Probably, and justifiably, McMurtry's most beloved novel, Lonesome Dove can be the story of a couple fellas getting old in a changing west- and when I reread (regularly) I admit I usually skip all the non Gus & Call stuff- but it's also an epic painting of the American West itself: almost every aspect of the Classic Western is included, kitchen sink as well, all viewed through the dusty and cracked glass of age. The west is getting old in this book, and there isn't a lot left of it. All of t More...

Ah, my very first western.

As I began Lonesome Dove, I felt like I was clawing my way through a desert without water; it begins that slowly. After about the first...third of the book (or about 300 pages), things finally picked up, and I began to enjoy it.

One thing I noticed and really liked about the book was the hero's journey feel of it. Following the journeys of several different characters revealed their various encounters with evil and with good. It felt like this book had hundreds of chara More...

I had this book on my top choices from a list of books that we might be assigned back in junior year of high school. Got "A Farewell to Arms" instead. But I found a hardcover in good condition for about $2 a few years later, so I got around to it eventually.
Larry McMurtry's epic is good enough that I'm thinking about reading others in the Lonesome Dove saga, although I probably won't - too many books, too little time. Lonesome Dove was certainly enjoyable. Entertaining, probably a less cerebral More...

I am giving this novel five stars because Goodreads doesn't allow me to give it ten.

Somewhere between its opening images of two snakes eating a rattlesnake and its final heartbreaking depictions of a good man just doing the wrong thing, I knew that I was going to be editing my review of A Prayer for Owen Meany because it is no longer my favorite novel of all time. Lonesome Dove is.

McMurtry pulls off an astonishing feat: He makes 940+ pages of cattle driving immensely readable. Wonderfully vivid More...

My husband picked this up for me from the shop where he works because I love horses and cowboy stories. I already had a couple of other books on the go so just opened up to the first page to see what I thought and that was it, hooked right away. As a Brit, I've always held a perhaps slightly over-romanticized view of the American Wild West but this book put that to bed pretty quickly. McMurtry writes with a gloriously understated, matter-of-fact tone that allows the characters room to tell the s More...

I don’t know why I’ve always avoided reading this novel despite having a love for long books (I get depressed when they end… so the longer the better). Or maybe it was because I never really had a taste for American literature, but I pretty much went into this novel cold turkey. I’d read one McMurtry book before – a nonfiction about his love of reading and rare book collecting - and I knew he used to hang out a lot at the Rice University library where I went to school, but other than that all I More...

Great characterization. Good pacing. Once you get some momentum, the length ceases to be daunting. The "love story" aspect didn't irk me like I expected. The fact that I've seen the mini-series only helped to enhance the read. Best western I've read. I feel like I ought to apologize to the ghost of Louis L'amour, who has been my go-to western author since I started reading books without pictures, but it's true - best western I've read.