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Books: A Memoir
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Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
List Price: $24.00
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In a prolific life of singular literary achievement, Larry McMurtry has succeeded in a variety of genres: in coming-of-age novels like The Last Picture Show; in collections of essays like In a Narrow Grave; and in the reinvention of the Western on a grand scale in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove. Now, in Books: A Memoir, McMurtry writes about his endless passion for books: as a boy growing up in a largely "bookless" world; as a young man devouring the vastness of literature with astonishing energy; as a fledgling writer and family man; and above all, as one of America's most prominent bookmen. He takes us on his journey to becoming an astute, adventurous book scout and collector who would eventually open stores of rare and collectible editions in Georgetown, Houston, and finally, in his previously "bookless" hometown of Archer City, Texas.
In this work of extraordinary charm, grace, and good humor, McMurtry recounts his life as both a reader and a writer, how the countless books he has read worked to form his literary tastes, while giving us a lively look at the eccentrics who collect, sell, or simply lust after rare volumes. Books: A Memoir is like the best kind of diary -- full of McMurtry's wonderful anecdotes, amazing characters, engaging gossip, and shrewd observations about authors, book people, literature, and the author himself. At once chatty, revealing, and deeply satisfying, Books is, like McMurtry, erudite, life loving, and filled with excellent stories. It is a book to be savored and enjoyed again and again.
PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416583349
ISBN: 1416583343
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2008-07-08
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster
SIMILAR ITEMS:
• The Library at Night
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel
• How Fiction Works
• Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
• Swan Peak: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
CUSTOMER REVIEWS:
For anybody who loves books and reading, BOOKS: A Memoir will be a great read -
Larry McMurtry has had as great an influence on books and movies as any living writer over the last half-century. From THE LAST PICTURE SHOW to LONESOME DOVE, he has penned 30 novels and 41 books, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. As a Hollywood screenwriter he won an Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain and has written 70 scripts.
Who would have guessed, as he tells us in BOOKS: A Memoir, that by the mid-1970s "Writing was my vocation, but I had written a lot, and it was no longer exactly a passion." And this was years before LONESOME DOVE and decades before Brokeback Mountain.
BOOKS: A Memoir is the story of McMurtry's real passion in life: book buying and selling. Over the years he has handled at least a million volumes as a bookseller. He owned a bookstore in Washington, D.C. for 36 years and now has turned his hometown of Archer City, Texas, into a book town where he owns six buildings, five of them filled with books. Indeed, you have a choice of 300,000 volumes to purchase when you enter his store, the appropriately titled Booked Up.
But you probably won't be able to find a latte or scone for sale in the joint. BOOKS: A Memoir is a beautifully written look into the still existing but little known world of antiquarian book dealers. And unfortunately, it soon might be a Lost World, grinded down beneath chain stores and a generation raised on Gameboys, not the Hardy Boys.
This work also gives us insights into the making of a great American writer. Who but McMurtry could write such a perfect sentence: "I don't remember either of my parents ever reading me a story --- perhaps that's why I've made up so many."
There were no books around his Texas ranch house in his earliest years, but then at the age of six, a cousin going off to World War II gave him a treasure --- a box containing 19 books. His life was forever changed. In his isolated rural setting, he tells us, "I came to reading before I came to American popular culture generally..."
McMurtry devoured his cousin's books multiple times and soon, as a young man, was searching through musty old bookstores, looking for books to read. He describes coming across shelves of Modern Library classics in Lovelace's Bookshop in Archer City and being filled "with a mixture of awe and fear." I was reminded of Pete Hamill's description of the awe he felt as a young boy exploring the Brooklyn Public Library and discovering THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. I wonder how much kids lose today when they don't have a similar experience. Not to mention our cultural life.
Soon McMurtry progresses from book scout to bookseller. As a young writer, Hollywood buys one of his early books and turns it into the movie Hud. And instead of purchasing a jazzy car and fancy house, like many of us writers would, his work in films will help him buy all or part of 30 bookstores over the years.
The antiquarian bookseller is like a deep sea fisherman, searching through garage sales, estate sales and auctions for the profitable find. And there is always the big fish that got away, such as when McMurtry sells a rare book, unknowingly for $45, and it ends up later being sold for $5,000.
We meet some of the wonderfully eccentric characters in this world, characters who could easily fill a McMurtry novel. For example, there is the English bookseller Anthony Newnham. McMurtry writes:
"Anthony Newnham tended to marry against type. His first wife, I am told, was a proper English housewife --- thus, in America, he usually went for wild, drug taking, motorcycle girls...Anthony's method...was to marry wild American girls and turn them into proper English housewives --- if they submitted to this change he rapidly lost interest. He was a very attractive man, even though, for a time, he had no front teeth, these having been knocked out by a cricket ball when he was nine. He lost his bridge and, for some years, didn't bother to replace it."
There are gems of great writing like this throughout the book. And we learn that in all his decades of operating a major bookshop in the Georgetown district of the nation's capital, "we sold only one real book to a member of Congress." Now there is a shock!
But for as much joy as there is in this book about books, there is also a subtle sadness. After all, the antiquarian book dealer makes his living when people die and their precious libraries are broken up and sold by relatives. McMurtry calls this "the silent migration of books." Then, there is the death of independent bookstores all over the country, driven out of business by the ubiquitous chains. Great old stores like Discover in San Francisco, the Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles and the Phoenix Bookshop in New York City appear in these pages. All gone forever, part of the Lost World. Even McMurtry's own shop in DC eventually gave way to a Pottery Barn of all insults.
McMurtry writes a simple yet beautiful sentence to describe when family members end up breaking up personal libraries that took years of hard labor to amass and gave endless satisfaction to their owners: "Something was over, and that was that."
But for those of us who have made a living in the word business, McMurtry's wonderful little book comes at a time when we, unimaginably, find ourselves thinking not about retirement plans but whether books and their cousins in serving civilization, newspapers, may be the thing that is over. So far in 2008, 6,000 journalists have lost their jobs and some newspaper stocks have dropped by 84% over the past year. The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a week. The business is dying.
And for those of us who must supplement our writing income not by selling books but by teaching college kids, we soon learn the depressing truth of America in 2008: young people are not reading either newspapers or books. McMurtry acknowledges this:
"I nowadays have a feeling that not only are most bookmen eccentrics, but even the act they support --- reading --- is an eccentricity now, if a mild one." But he remains optimistic about the future. He writes, "Very quickly, once I had my 19 books, I realized that reading was the cheapest and most stable pleasure in life. Sometimes books excite me, sometimes they sustain me, but rarely do they disappoint me --- as books, that is, if not necessarily the poetry, history, or fiction that they contain."
One can only hope that another young person will one day wander into one of the musty old bookstores remaining, pick up a book that has existed for centuries and be filled with awe and captivated by the magic that is books. Upon that child, the fate of this democracy and perhaps even our civilization may just depend.
For anybody who loves books and reading, BOOKS: A Memoir will be a great read and a treasured addition to your personal library.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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A thorough disappointment -
The IDEA of a book about books by Larry McMurtry is utterly compelling. The moment I saw it, I "one-clicked" it. The editorial reviews which describe the book as being what the common McMurtry lover (me) expected, must have scanned the first 30 or so pages and written on reputation. This is a bewilderingly awful book, for all the negative reasons mentioned in other reviews.
A Disappointing, Half-hearted Effort -
I regret to report that this is a mediocre book. And, with the exceedingly sparse printing per page, it also borders on a publishing rip-off. It purports to be a memoir of McMurtry's life with books -- both reading books and buying and selling books as a second-hand book dealer. But there is much more of the latter than the former. Weird bibliophile that I am, I happen to like good memoirs of rare and second-hand booksellers, but I don't think most people do, and this one does not really qualify as "good".
Perhaps McMurtry had promised himself or a publisher that some day he would write such a memoir, but when he finally got around to doing it, he no longer had the requisite energy. In any event, BOOKS: A MEMOIR seems to be the product of, at best, a half-hearted effort. (McMurtry's recent articles in "The New York Review of Books" show more time and effort than this book.)
To elaborate on the publishing rip-off: the book consists of 109 very short chapters, each of which begins one-third of the way down an odd-numbered page, regardless where the previous chapter had ended. Thus, there are many completely blank pages as well as many other pages with at best a third of a page of text. Although there are 259 numbered pages in the book, there are less than 160 pages of actual text. At $24.00 retail, that is pretty niggardly.
I can't imagine BOOKS: A MEMOIR appealing to anyone other than a Larry McMurtry completist or groupie. (Are there any such folks? Maybe so, to judge from some of the other reviews). Even for those, like me, afflicted with bibliomania, it is disappointing. It pales in comparison to McMurtry's earlier memoir, "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen." I rather doubt that BOOKS will be a much prized or sought-for item in whatever second-hand book stores there are fifty years hence.
For a limited audience -
If you're looking for a book about the love of reading (as I was when I bought this book), this is not the book for you. If, however, you enjoy anecdotes about the who's who of the antiquarian book trade, pick this one up.
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Instead, re-read Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen -
Larry McMurtry is tired, ornery, depressed.
He worries that people don't read much anymore. He stopped reading fiction, for the most part, 20 years ago. He likes British political biography, the diaries of minor British aristocrats, (mostly) British travel writers, and of course the history of the American West (on which he has written and reviewed wonderfully), although there isn't really any of that here.
He is a book collector. Personally, I don't understand the collector mentality and find it annoying. He wonders why most people would care to read that he found such-and-such a book for $1 in 1956 in a garage and now it fetches $12,000 at Christie's. He is right to wonder, as are his editors and publishers. (Perhaps this is the last "book" of a multi-book deal?)
Over the years, Larry McMurtry has run into some colorful characters and come across rare books in book shops and at auctions. He relates a few humorous anecdotes about such people and things in a way that makes them not very funny. He summarizes the existences of a number of book stores and their owners/collectors (which should be interesting, but is not).
This latest effort reads like a series of notes for a book. Or the draft of a magazine article. It is randomly assembled and poorly edited. (By this I mean the editors should have told him, No, Please Give Us Something Approaching a Book!) Eventually, I started skimming for obscure book recommendations, and even found a few. The one surprise here is that McMurtry had and/or has large collections of comics and soft pornographic novels over the years. And he considers Pynchon's V a "masterpiece."
Most tellingly, and in defense of the title of my review, he repeats, very often, anecdotes from his great book-length essay, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Please, if you read this review, and haven't read that, DO NOT read Books, but rather go and get yourself a copy of Dairy Queen instead.
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