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It is the New Year! Time to write about porn.

Yes! What an excellent idea!

Unfortunately, though excellent it may be, it is only impossible for me to do so. Therefore, permit me to pass you an equally excellent link: Soiled Doves of the Old West.

And if you're wondering what prompted this non sequitur of a post, I will have to say I've changed genres in my reading. For the past year or so, I've been telling everyone who's bothered to listen to me that I was in my Science Fiction phase and most of my reading has been SF-related. I guess it's safe to say I've since switched to reading Westerns...

...yeah, I know. Not an improvement on my literary tastes, but I rewatched Sergio Leone's masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West recently and it dredged up a longing inside me for the Wild West.

Am currently reading Louis L'amour's Flint, which is enjoyable but the writing keeps raising my inner editor's warning sirens (Character perspectives change mid-paragraph! Repetition!). I also found True Grit by Charles Porter at BookXcess which I bought immediately and will read once I've finished Flint.

Comments

  1. Hi Ted, you should try Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy if you haven't already done so. I didn't think I was into Westerns until I read All the Pretty Horses - fantastic!

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  2. Ooh! Thanks for the suggestion, Yang-May. I will try it out.

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  3. I recommend Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry - possibly the only western I've read and I enjoyed it tremendously, particularly on interpersonal relationships (it ain't always about the horses..). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction!

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  4. I correct myself, I've also read Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx. Never expected Brokeback Mountain to be adapted as a movie but very happy that it turned out very well! (hey, Larry McMurtry helped adapt the screenplay!). Annie Proulx is a hard-hitting writer - the Shipping News, while not a western, was one of the first 'adult' (as in not YA) novels I read as a teenager that shook me into the wider world of fiction.

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