Stayton Bonner

Larry McMurtry recently released Rhino Ranch, the fifth book in his Thalia series. Duane is the recurring character. We first met him as a teenager in The Last Picture Show. That was a great book. It's sequel, Texasville, was so bad I couldn't finish it. The third book, Duane's Depressed, is often overlooked. It's the best of the series and one of the best of McMurtry's career, (alongside his non-fiction mediation on family and Tahiti entitled Paradise.) When the Light Goes, the fourth installment, was better than critics claimed but not that memorable. So it follows that, in the rollercoaster trajectory of this series, the new book Rhino Ranch should be great. I need to pick up a copy and find out.

Fans may buy a signed first edition of the book from my friends Cody and Julie Ressell at Three Dog Books. In 2006, we worked with McMurtry on a chapbook entitled The Bookman. Speaking on the future of his antiquarian bookdealing trade, he was cautious:

  "We don't have many young people buying books... I'm not saying that young people are less literate, I'm saying that the manner of their literacy is different now. They have all the digital media."

Nicholson Baker recently test-drove a Kindle for The New Yorker in a piece entitled "A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book?" Baker didn't care much for the Kindle but he acknowledges that the digital medium seems to be displacing old glue and bindings. I personally like the feel of a book but see the need for digital format literature. People are reading shorter segments, the visual equivalent of a sound-bite, but more people are reading. Period. And that's a good thing.

Which begs the question. Would Proust have Tweeted?