whilereadingandwalking: “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I do
whilereadingandwalking: “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ―Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment, and cowriter of the Brokeback Mountain screenplay, has died.Lonesome Dove is one of my father’s favorite books; he gave me a copy of the 850-page Western epic in 2018, and I returned the favor, gifting him a signed 1st edition (though not first printing) for Christmas in 2019. It’s a long, wistful book, and many people say he wrote the unromanticized lives of cowboys: he emphasized the hardship they went through, the violence, the struggle with the elements, the complicated story, often simplified, of the clashes between cowboys and Native Americans. I learned from the New York Times piece on McMurtry that he owned and ran an antiquarian bookstore, Booked Up in Texas, and that he was exceptionally skilled at book purchasing. A reporter who profiled him once wrote: “He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten writing.” He consolidated and sold much of the collection in 2012, to make the business more manageable. He had a private library of more than 30,000 books and said that the collection was “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves.” It comes down to this: goodbye today to a great lover of books and author. -- source link