Lonesome Dove grew on me

After reading all these Westerns, I figured that I ought to read Lonesome Dove, because it’s the most famous Western. This book won the Pulitzer in 1986, but that's not why it's famous—many books have won the Pulitzer and been forgotten. It’s famous because even today people still read this book and love it.

So I started to read this book. And I found the beginning to be extremely tough going. I have rarely been so bored. The book is set in the 1870s, and it's about these two men, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow McCall, who are cattle rustlers. They live in Texas, on the border with Mexico, and they periodically head down, steal some Mexican cattle, and drive them north of the border to sell.

Augustus and Woodrow used to be Texas Rangers, and their rustling operation—'the Hat Creek outfit'—also employs several former members of their company, Josh Deets, who is Black and an expert tracker, and Pea Eye Parker, who is somewhat useless. Nearby there is a tiny, barren, treeless town named Lonesome Dove that is also full of various grotesques who I won’t bother to describe.

A former member of their ranger company, Jake Spoon, comes rolling through. Jake is a gambler, who's on the run because he accidentally murdered a dentist in Arkansas. He convinces the guys that there's big money to be made if they can drive a herd of cattle all the way up to Montana.

And, slowly, creakily, over the course of 200 pages, this operation gets going.

Much of the early part of the book is in Augustus's point of view, and Gus has a tendency to ruminate, delivering acres of exposition about people before we really get a chance to know them. For instance, here's Gus thinking about Woodrow Call:

The funny thing about Woodrow Call was how hard he was to keep in scale. He wasn’t a big man—in fact, was barely middle-sized—but when you walked up and looked him in the eye it didn’t seem that way. Augustus was four inches taller than his partner, and Pea Eye three inches taller yet, but there was no way you could have convinced Pea Eye that Captain Call was the short man. Call had him buffaloed, and in that respect Pea had plenty of company. If a man meant to hold his own with Call it was necessary to keep

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