The Great American Read--The Book of Books
Page 18
Gone for more than 10 years, former Texas Ranger Jake Spoon returns to the tiny Texas town of Lonesome Dove, where he reunites with his friends Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus “Gus” McCrae. After retiring from the Rangers, Call and McCrae now oversee the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium, living a peaceful life. Jake, however, is on the run after accidentally killing a sheriff’s brother, and he convinces McCrae, Call, and some other men to go to Montana, where they intend to create the area’s first cattle ranch. Soon the Hat Creek boys, Jake, his prostitute-lover Lorena, and the sheriff and his crew are winding through the dangerous landscape.
The novel takes place in the 1870s, a time when the West was a place of boundless freedom but also of vicious lawlessness. Very slowly states began to join the Union, completing the dream of manifest destiny and stretching America from sea to sea. Settlers, with the approval and encouragement of the federal government, claimed territory from Native American inhabitants, causing chaos, mass murder, and increasingly desperate, violent retaliation. Hunters slaughtered vast herds of buffalo. Farmers started, quite literally, to put down roots. Robbers roamed, looking for wealth and prey, and vigilantes dispensed their form of justice. All of these actual events inform the ambitious, sinuous plot of Lonesome Dove, as McMurtry seeks to strip away glorifying myths and show readers how the West was really won.
He knows the region’s truths as well as its legends deep in his bones. Larry McMurtry was born in 1936 to a family of ranchers outside of Archer City, Texas. He grew up hearing stories but discovered books after a cousin left behind a bunch and McMurtry cracked one open. After living elsewhere around the United States, including in California while a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, McMurtry returned to Archer City in the 1980s and opened a large used bookstore in the town. In addition to books he writes screenplays, a genre in which he’s also garnered significant accolades. He cowrote the Academy Award–winning The Last Picture Show (1971), based on his 1966 semiautobiographical novel of the same name, and won an Oscar for his screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005).
McMurtry continued to visit the world of Lonesome Dove, Texas, after the publication of the original novel, with three more works following the exploits of Call, McCrae, McCrae’s true love Clara, Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump, a bandit known as Blue Duck, and other memorable characters. He’s set many of his 30-odd novels in the West, from Houston to an imagined version of Archer City to the Great Plains. The region’s pull seems inescapable, for him and for us.
If You Like…
WHAT’S YOUR NEXT READ?
LOOKING FOR your next great read? Our chart enables you to quickly and easily find similar titles. If you like one, read the next and the next and the next, then try another category.
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A paperback cover of Looking for Alaska, first published in 2005.
Author John Green, photographed in The Hollywood Reporter in 2004. Green is often called “the teen whisperer” for his deep understanding of teenagers and their experiences.
The 10th-anniversary edition cover of the book.
61
LOOKING FOR ALASKA
John Green · 2005
He’s called “the teen whisperer.” The label reflects the YA author’s deep, almost preternatural understanding of adolescence—its pain, its excitement, its over-the-top emotions and energy. John Green might be a married middle-aged man with children, but he appears to have a direct pipeline into the worries and wonders of young adulthood. And it all started with Looking for Alaska (2005).
Told in the first person by a high-school junior named Miles Halter, Green’s debut novel focuses on the before and after of a life-changing event. Chapter titles keep track of the time, beginning with “One Hundred Thirty-Six Days Before” and concluding with “One Hundred Thirty-Six Days After.” Miles arrives at Culver Creek Preparatory High School looking to make some changes. He meets Chip, Takumi, and the gorgeous, temperamental, free-spirited Alaska. These new friends nickname him Pudge, encourage him to cut loose, and teach him the school’s main rule: don’t be a tattletale. They play pranks, they have fun, they bond over their deepest, funniest, wildest moments. In short, they become close as only teens can be—until one moment turns everything upside down.
Looking for Alaska bursts with beautiful lines and metaphors: “[I]f people were rain,” Miles thinks about Alaska, “I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.” Later he compares the passing of a loved one to losing a pair of glasses and then being told that, since glasses no longer exist in the world, he would just have to make do. Miles starts school hoping to find what he calls his “Great Perhaps,” the last words of poet François Rabelais. He seeks out and quotes people’s dying words in an attempt to discern the life that came before. Yet Miles wants to find mystery and magic now, in life, rather than in death. It’s a sad twist that he finds both mystery and magic in death too.
Green was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1977, grew up in Orlando, Florida, and attended boarding school in Birmingham, Alabama, much as his protagonist Miles does. In Birmingham Green knew a student who died, but, as he repeatedly stresses, Looking for Alaska isn’t a roman à clef. In honor of the book’s 10th anniversary, a special edition was released with early drafts and ephemera. Since the success of his first novel, Green has released several other bestsellers, including the megahit The Fault in Our Stars (2012), a love story about two teens with cancer. His books often feature smart-alecky characters who experience profound anguish on their journey to adulthood.
With its prep-school setting and tragic loss, Looking for Alaska has been compared to A Separate Peace (1959). Miles’s voice sometimes reminds readers of Holden Caulfield’s in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), another novel about a young person concerned about what’s to come. The stakes in books like these feel great because they are: it is as teens that we start to seriously consider how lives take shape, when we begin to understand the importance of not only asking questions about what might make our days meaningful but striving to answer them.
Despite the parallels with earlier writers, Green exists in a world of his own creation, much of it online: entire sections of the internet are devoted to people displaying tattoos of lines from his novels, and Green is widely considered to be peerless in his mastery of social media as a means of connecting with readers. In 2007, Green and his brother, Hank, began communicating with one another via videos, a process known as vlogging, and their shared YouTube channel has millions of subscribers. Green’s fans call themselves “nerdfighters,” a positive term meant to show their pleasure in being interested in stuff that others might find dorky. One of their catchphrases is “Don’t forget to be awesome.” Green unquestionably takes that advice to heart.
The first complete American editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, originally published from 1954 to 1955.
Photographed here in 1982, J. R. R. Tolkien was a writer and a specialist in medieval literature, which inspired his novels.
An early map of the Shire, drawn by Tolkien, shows Frodo, Sam, and Pippin’s travels in blue. Edits and other notes are written in pencil.
62
THE LORD OF THE RINGS SERIES
J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954–1955
Bored one day while grading student exams, an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon jotted In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit on someone’s paper. That idle scrawl became the first line of The Hobbit (1937), which introduced readers to the race of halflings known as hobbits, with their love of fireworks and food. When the book became a bestseller, its publisher asked its author, J. R. R. Tolkien, to write a sequel. He did, and more than a decade later published three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. Collectively known as The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), the works fundamentally altered the genre of fantasy.
Long before the beginning of The Hobbit, Sauron, the Dark Lord, created the One Ring. This ring would enable its wearer to rule over all the inhabitants of Middle-earth, among them elves, humans, and dwarves. Defeated in battle, Sauron lost his physical form, and the ring wound up in the hands of Bilbo Baggins, a lovable hobbit who gifts it to his ward, Frodo Baggins, as The Lord of the Rings begins. With the help of the wise wizard Gandalf the Grey, Frodo discovers the ring’s menacing purpose, and the improbable hero and various friends and companions set off to destroy it via the fire of Mount Doom in Mordor.
The series is an astonishing accomplishment. Its descriptions feel like transcriptions, so vivid are the details of Middle-earth, from its geography to its multiple languages to its diverse inhabitants. Then there are the complicated lineages and histories spread over the ages, much of which Tolkien included not in the novel’s proper text but in lengthy appendices.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 to British parents in what is now South Africa. When he was four his family moved to England, where he was home-schooled by his mother and raised a Roman Catholic. Even as a child he showed admirable facility with languages, inventing several fictional tongues—some of which he would continue to work on for decades—and eventually becoming a scholar of Old and Middle English, among other dialects. He worked for a time at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he handled words beginning with the letter w. Years later he entered the OED pantheon once again, as the creator of such gems as mithril (a beautiful, hard metal) and orcish (resembling a foul, nasty orc).
Power corrupts, goes the saying, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The ring, as a symbol of unchecked power, causes anyone who wears it to become evil. In some cases, just being near the ring is tempting enough to bring about a personality alteration. Almost everyone who comes into contact with the ring changes: the human Black Riders become the zombielike Ringwraiths, nice Sméagol becomes the murderous Gollum, and the noble warrior Boromir decides he’d rather hang on to the ring and go after Sauron than destroy the ring (which would al
so destroy Sauron). Even Frodo feels the ring’s corrosive effects by the end of the novel. Far better to stay at home and gobble up your second breakfast.
Peter Jackson adapted Tolkien’s books for the big screen, releasing six movies between 2001 and 2014. All told, the movies earned almost $6 billion and won 17 Academy Awards. Amazon recently announced that it would be developing the books for the small screen.
The Lord of the Rings offers unambiguous heroes and antiheroes in the form of such characters as Legolas, Aragorn, and the Witch-king of Angmar. Many scholars and readers trace a Christian through line in Tolkien’s work, a reflection of his religiosity in life. Nevertheless, Tolkien denied any symbolic implications, saying to his publisher, “[The Lord of the Rings] is not ‘about’ anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political.” However they interpret the books, readers have developed a deep affection for Middle-earth, a place where heroes still walk, even if their strides are short and their feet are hairy.
First edition cover of The Lovely Bones, from 2002.
Author Alice Sebold, photographed in New York City. The Lovely Bones was her debut novel, which was wildly successful.
In her memoir, Lucky, Sebold writes about being assaulted and raped coming home from a party in college. The title was inspired by a police officer, who told Sebold she was lucky to be alive.