Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

    What. A. Book! Lonesome Dove is an absolute epic, and reading it right after Moby Dick makes it feel like an amazing foil to Moby Dick. But on its own merits, Lonesome Dove is this incredible collection of events on a big cattle drive from Texas to Montana, and I definitely want to watch the miniseries, which is apparently amazing as well.

    I couldn't stop thinking about the Moby Dick comparison. The two books are both set around the same period, just a few decades apart in the mid-19th century. Both of them are stories of men going on a journey, but one is on land, and another is at sea. In Moby Dick, everything builds towards an absolutely massive climax, but in Lonesome Dove, the feeling you're left with over and over is anti-climax. Almost no one achieves their goals in Lonesome Dove. Almost everyone dies. The language is also very different in each book. Moby Dick is highly stylized and rich language, while Lonesome Dove is bare bones, especially in dialogue. McMurtry likes to go one for paragraphs or pages about a character's internal thoughts, but then make their dialogue almost nothing. Lonesome Dove is filled with characters not telling each other how they feel or what they think. But the characters are similar to Moby Dick in that they are all on the frontier, having few opportunities for good conversation.

    The best character in Lonesome Dove is The West. The West is like The Whale in Moby Dick, except no one can be mad at The West since none of the cowboys are as insane as Ahab. Except that in Lonesome Dove, by the end of the book, Call can't stop going north, getting a little hint of the madness that struck Ahab from the beginning. There are all these confrontations with nature itself in lightning storms, sand storms, flooding rivers, thirst, etc. Then you have all these intermittent confrontations with other men in the west, a lot like in Cormac McCarthy's books.

    In sum, this book was excellent, one of the best I've read in a very long time.