Yong (6/26): Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

With my summer reading window rapidly drawing to a close, I checked this massive book out from the library in a last minute act of foolishness, feebly denying to myself that it wasn't entirely, laughably unsuitable for my need for light travel reading for the long flight to Australia next week. As one act of foolishness often begets another, here I sit having just finished all eight hundred fifty pages before ever having set foot on the plane.

Former Texas Rangers tire of the quiet ranching life and hatch a City Slickers-esque mid-life crisis plan to drive a herd of cattle an unheard of 3000 miles to the unsettled wilds of Montana. Is it any good? Pulitzer aside, after plodding through my last two (real) books, I devoured this one's 858 pages in three days.

What's it about? The harshness of life in general, and life on the frontier in particular; the wantonness of death; the beauty of the land, Texas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and its hardness, too; but above all else, the human heart. For even cowboys get lonesome, too.