May Book Club Announcement
Fran Magazine: Issue #142
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Book club is back!
For the past two years, I’ve dedicated Mondays in May for book club discussions of a tome (or tome-lite) I am interested in reading. I always like the idea of a book club much more than participating in them, but what I’ve come to realize is that I really only ever want to be in a book club with a finite end date. May is a long month, and it’s not quite warm enough to be outside all the time but there’s plenty of daylight. These are (to me at least) perfect reading conditions.
If you haven’t done a May Book Club before, it is all very low stakes. This is not homework. I’m not your teacher. I’ll split our book into four parts, and each Monday in May, I’ll write a bit about what we’ve all just read, identifying any relevant or beautiful passages and considering what might come ahead of provide some supplementary reading. You can feel free and comment to do the same, or you can just lurk and that’s equally valid. If you don’t know where to start, picking a paragraph that stood out to you for any number of reasons is a good place to begin. We keep things loose and easy — reading a big book should and is fun. Let’s keep it that way.
I’ve spent the first chunk of the year thinking long and hard, consulting with the Fran Magazine inner circle, and eventually decided on our shared May reading.
In 2023, we had Middlemarch May.
In 2024, we had Mervyn May.
In 2025, we have…
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McMurtry May!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That’s right, we are reading Larry McMurtry’s 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove, and I did not make this selection because of this Esquire article and in fact made up my mind about this long before bloggers got ahold of the idea!!!! I’ve wanted to read Lonesome Dove for forever — it very nearly beat out Gormenghast last year — and I think it’ll make for engaging and fun reading later this spring. Everyone in my family loves this book so much and I’ve long been the disappointment of the group for not having read it yet. Soon, that will be remedied, and a new family enemy will emerge.
Don’t believe me? Here’s bestselling author and friend of the magazine Blythe Roberson — who basically seemed like she was going to burst into tears when I told her this was the pick — on Lonesome Dove:
Larry McMurtry is great. We will talk about him a lot. One of my most formative memories as a teenager was watching him accept an Oscar wearing jeans. I didn’t know you could do that!!
In addition to being a successful novelist, McMurtry had a number of his works adapted into mainstream films, including but not limited to The Last Picture Show, Hud, and Terms of Endearment. There will almost certainly a bonus issue of McMurtry May where we talk about the movies based on his books but there won’t be additional homework! Speaking of Terms of Endearment, I feel like Debra Winger was really spitting here.
Anyway, you can snag Lonesome Dove from Bookshop or your local store or even the public library so long as you make sure you’re able to renew it sometime during the course of May. I like to make this announcement early so that every can get a copy by the time we start, and then we can all get cookin’ together on May 1st. I’ll have a greater sense of a reading schedule once my copy is in my hands — expect that to come at the end of April.
Should I have picked a Pynchon novel in honor of One Battle After Another? (No.) Are you looking forward to reading Lonesome Dove? Have you read it — or any other McMurtry — before? Do you rock with Westerns?
I love this book and I also want to note that there is an outstanding TV adaptation starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and Diane Lane
I read this in paperback in the Fall of 1986 (back when Dad and I couldn't afford hardcovers or two copies, so he read it first). I had given up on the hardcover version of IT, and read this instead. I had just started a new job with mandatory breaks: 15 minutes in the morning and afternoon. So I sat on a chair in the parking lot, with everyone smoking around me, and read every break and every lunchtime. What an incredible book! What a tone deaf way to start a new job! I REGRET NOTHING. I am so excited to re-read it.