Book: A Memoir - Larry McMurtry

Clay Reynolds, Paul Wilner, and Ed Nawotka reviews

'Books: A Memoir' by Larry McMurtry: Texas author reveals lifelong love affair with reading

Sunday, July 6, 2008

By CLAY REYNOLDS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Novelist Clay Reynolds is Professor of Arts & Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. His latest work of fiction is Sandhill County Lines.

[The review begins]

"There are, one may infer from Larry McMurtry's 38th solo volume, four kinds of people who love second-hand bookshops: readers, collectors, dealers and scouts. Writers, which he certainly is, do not always subscribe, for they often see a used-book store as a kind of mortuary, a place where careers often go, too soon, to be buried.

He fits the other categories, though, for he is first and foremost a bookman, and he implies that his writing has merely been a handy enabler of that more profound love.

This newest peek into the life of a Texas favorite son author is no less intriguing or less frustrating than have been previous autobiographies."

Read more at http://www.guidelive.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_mcmurtry_0706gl.ART.State.Bulldog.4d51a33.html

or read the LA Times, same topic

By Paul Wilner July 6, 2008
BooksA MemoirLarry McMurtrySimon & Schuster: 260 pp., $24"The older the violin, the sweeter the music," Gus McCrae remarks in "Lonesome Dove," Larry McMurtry's magisterial western about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana and the havoc wreaked in its path. The silver-tongued devil's observation is about affairs of the heart, of course, but it could well serve as a description of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's career.In his latest work, "Books: A Memoir," McMurtry, 72, takes an elegiac look back at his life as a buyer, seller and lover of the written word -- he boasts that Booked Up, the fabled store he opened in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, a few years back, has 28,000 secondhand volumes of the product we currently hear may soon be eclipsed by Kindle."

Read more from the LA Times

or read the Austin American Statesman review

Larry McMurtry's 'Books': rambling, disorganized, dull
The 'Lonesome Dove' author leads us through a disappointing tour of his life as a bookseller
By Edward Nawotka

July 06, 2008

[Ed begins]
"In his new memoir "Books" — an account of his more than 50-year career as a "bookman" — Larry McMurtry states that "the antiquarian book trade is an anecdotal culture." To wit, I start thusly: In my 20s, I spent a summer working for an antiquarian book-seller. It was a prestigious place, just off Boston's posh Newbury Street, run by a married pair of blue-blood WASPs who hired their interns from Harvard and — in those pre-Internet times — researched the provenance of any book they didn't have immediate knowledge of by going down to the Boston Athenaeum, a members-only library dating back to 1807. "

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