recent reading :
— Larry McMurtry. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. Simon and Schuster, [1999].
But the problem with reading lists, even one as intelligent as Cyril Connolly’s The Modern Movement, is that they are all in a sense dead letters, guides for the unadventurous, those without the time or the ambition to hunt around and make discoveries for themselves. The great readers will always know about books that neither the marketplace nor the academy has got around to.
McMurtry, novelist and screenwriter whose writing career was sustained by his other life as book scout and antiquarian bookman, here expresses ever so clearly the unvoiced contempt some booksellers have for their customers. In 1999, McMurtry opened Booked Up in Archer City, Texas. It was his book town, a contrarian and rearguard enterprise in defiance of the internet that endured for several years. I have few regrets, but one of them is that I never made it to Archer City, or to the auction when the books were dispersed.
——. Books. A Memoir. Simon and Schuster, [2008].
——. Literary Life. A Second Memoir. Simon and Schuster, [2009].
——. Hollywood. A Third Memoir. Simon and Schuster, [2010].
These three entertaining memoirs cover some of the same ground as the earlier book, in chapters short enough to be aphorisms, and there is some inevitable tangling when the lines of his life refuse to conform with categories (and some repetition). McMurtry’s forebears were cattle ranchers ; his clear-eyed recognition of himself as a rancher of words and books is an excellent metaphor.