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Books

A Memoir

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

Larry McMurtry is known to be reclusive and extremely private, rarely giving interviews or making public appearances. Audiences are therefore sure to be eager to read this intimate and surprisingly personal memoir of the brilliant writer's love affair with books. McMurtry writes about his life as a boy growing up in a largely bookless world; as a young man devouring the world of literature; as a fledgling writer and family man; and as one of America's most prominent "bookmen," becoming the astute and adventurous collector who would eventually open stores of rare and collectible books in Georgetown, Houston, and his hometown of Archer, Texas.

In Books: A Memoir, McMurtry gives us a lively look at the eccentrics who collect, sell, or simply lust after rare books. Books is like the best kind of diary - full of wonderful anecdotes, amazing characters, great gossip, and shrewd observations about authors, book people, literature, and himself. At once chatty, revealing, and deeply satisfying, Books is, like its author, erudite, life-loving, and full of great stories.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      This memoir by one of America's most accomplished writers is not about his writing, or even writing in general. It's about his passion for books, which started with his own reading and later mushroomed into an eclectic used and rare book business in the previously bookless town of Archer, Texas. It's the dusty Texas plain that most shapes the book, and McMurtry's writing. And that's where the reading fails the listener. The author writes in a laconic yet incisive style that isn't matched by the narrator. William Dufris renders the work easy to listen to and carries it well, but his delivery just doesn't match the "Texas-ness" that permeates everything McMurtry writes. It's really a case of promise unfulfilled. The work is serviceable, but it falls short of what it could have been. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 26, 2008
      McMurtry (Lonesome Dove
      ) calls this “a book about my life with books.” He begins with his Texas childhood in an isolated, “totally bookless” ranch house. His life changed in 1942 when a cousin, off to enlist, gave McMurtry a box of 19 adventure books, initiating what eventually became his personal library of 28,000 books. “Forming that library, and reading it, is surely one of the principal achievements of my life,” he writes, deftly interweaving book-collecting memories with autobiographical milestones. When his family moved to Archer City, Tex., he found more books, plus magazines, films and comic books. In Houston, attending Rice, he explored the 600,000 volumes in the “wonderful open-stack Fondren Library... heaven!” In 1971, after years of collecting, he opened his own bookstore, Booked Up, in Georgetown, Tex., relocating in 1996 to Archer City, where he created a “book town” by filling five buildings with 300,000 books. McMurtry offers opinions on everything from bookplates and audiobooks to the cyber revolution and 1950s paperbacks: “Paperback covers, many very sexy, were the advance guard of the rapid breakdown of sexual restraint among the middle classes almost everywhere.” While there are anecdotes about bookshops and crafty dealers, McMurtry is at his best when he uses his considerable skills as a writer to recreate moments from his personal past.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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