Lonesome dove

The FWB read Lonesome Dove in about 20 hours: not bad for 925 pages; her brother, when he heard the news, said “Well, if times get hard, you can always sell her for medical research.” It took me a little longer, because of distractions like work. But it has been years since I found a book I wanted to read in such huge gulps. There are a couple of rough patches, but the size and strangeness of the frontier comes over wonderfully. Whan I had finished, I went off and bought a year’s worth of USGS maps to find out where it all happened. All Mapquest and Google maps show you of a place are the roads and the advertisements. It’s extraordinary to realise that the prairies and the rivers have vanished even from the maps.