In one of the most surprising instances of All Books Are One Book, Joan W. Blos's protagonist Catherine hears about Nat Turner's 1831 uprising. Otherwise, despite her being from New Hampshire at exactly the time Sturbridge Village is set, this book barely touched me and I don't see how it won the Newbery.
I was goofy with the elliptical, resetting it when I didn't want to, and I had already reset it after five minutes of warm-up, so when I had done about 15 minutes I decided what the hell, I should do some weights for once in an era. So I did. The one advantage to weights is that I can listen to a book instead of music, though I probably would have stuck to music if I hadn't had only two hours of Lonesome Dove to go.
Reasons: it won a Pulitzer; also the Western is the one genre I have never read.
I liked the first section with Call and Gus at Hat Creek, as long as the men were alone. There was one woman, the hooker with a heart of gold, and a scattering of unwomen, like desiccated widows and shrewish wives.
Then we meet Elmira, another shrew, who never hears anything her husband of four months says because he never says anything new. Except that immediately preceding Larry McMurtry's telling us this is her being annoyed at his habitually asking his stepson at every dinner whether he wants any buttermilk, which the stepson doesn't like.
I only recently learned the term "cover" for "to mate": I was looking up the origin of a horse breed and came across mention of a gene pool so small but so desirable that horse-breeders had sires "cover" their own offspring. I would have understood "he covered her" without that, but I would have missed the lovely, and so appropriate for the genre, bestial taint.
I admit that I expected to sneer at The Da Vinci Code and I read the first chapters pen in hand to mark logical fallacies (instead of, say, not reading them at all), but I don't think it was solely my predisposition that made my eyes bleed in the third paragraph, when a silhouette glared. As a metaphor, it just didn't work for me. I thought of that when, in contrast, I really liked once in Lonesome Dove when sun groped through clearing rain. Without a "the," I can read that as "sunlight," where the article would have made it Sol and too close for comfort.
Flat stereotypes in I Am Charlotte Simmons annoyed me, but the same thing--the John Wayne silent type, the hooker with a heart of gold (most of them), the bloodthirsty Comanche, the instinctually superior cowboy, the wise but unheard Mexican--didn't as much: I expected them in a western. I didn't expect the Dickensian coincidence of everyone happening across everyone else's path: in the four points between Texas and Montana, Arkansas and Colorado, there seem to have been only a score of people.
A great story. Except that the very ending was an afterthought.