“Why does one remember one thing vividly and another thing vaguely, if at all? In this course of this piece I’ve come to realize that the only things I remember as well as I remember certain books, found in certain bookshops, in such and such condition, are women, about whom I mean to say little or nothing just at the present time.” “I remember thinking, after two of three readings [of ABC of Reading, that this man, Ezra Pound, was as serious about writing as my father was about cattle – in those days I measured all seriousness against my father’s attitude about cattle.” Even to bring hundreds of thousands of books home to share what he loves. After college and all of his success, he was happy to return to Archer City. Not really – he seemed more bemused than anything, laughing at his own fear of poultry and his inability to cowboy. I thought that being a cultural “fish out of water” as a reader in a small West Texas town without a library would make him self-conscious or bitter when looking back. For some reason I thought he was a bit of a curmudgeon.
What surprised me the most in this book is the affection McMurtry has for so many things – his childhood, his family, reading, and of course for books themselves. McMurtry is a patron author of lost causes – the West, cowboys, independent second-hand booksellers, small towns. Even if staying on them doesn’t make any sense. They’re about big spaces and the people resolved to stay on them. As he shares here, most of his books are probably about Archer City. That’s Larry McMurtry’s hometown, as well as the subject of his book The Last Picture Show.
The cover photo, though, is the Dairy Queen in Archer City, Texas. A DQ can be a cultural hub in a rural area. Now I take my own kids there now when passing through.
I used to go there as a teenager when driving to college. That DQ photo reminds me of the Dairy Queen I’d often stop at in Goldthwaite, Texas, at the intersection of Highway 183 and 16. I have great affection for everything about this book: the Dairy Queen cover photo, the West Texas rumination, the author’s cherishing of books and words.
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