The Western

My next choice of read requires some explanation.

About a decade ago my parents bought a weekend home that would eventually lead to their retirement home out in the relative rugged mountains and woodlands of northern Pennsylvania. I’ve been up there two or three dozen times, as it is about a 90-minute drive from my home, and while I’m no outdoorsman – don’t fish, don’t hunt, don’t know what poison ivy looks like, am scared of bugs – I enjoy my time there. I love the quiet and the seclusion.

From the very first I noticed that you pass the Zane Grey museum as you drive up there. That intrigued me, right from the start. The only other “personal” museum I’ve been to was FDR’s in Hyde Park, and it was fascinating, enlightening, and put you in the shoes of a great man, regardless of what you think of his politics. I decided I wanted to check out the Zane Grey museum, but for one problem. I had never read a single book of his.

Zane Grey was a prolific writer of Westerns in the early 20th century, writing about 85 of them (the figures I’ve seen vary a bit as a lot of his stuff was published posthumously). I remember the name from one of the novels in my dad’s hidden treasure trove of paperbacks I stumbled across as a lad of ten. Though I read all the other books in that drawer – all SF and fantasy – I did not read that book, and to this day can’t recall the title.

My only real knowledge of the Western is from movies, primarily John Wayne and Clint Eastwood flicks, though I’ve watched a few with Henry Fonda, Robert Duvall, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, and others. Most of the ones I’ve watched were good and true and decent; though it’s not my normal choice of entertainment, I don’t mind a good Western.

Officially, I think I’ve only read three Westerns in my entire life: The Red Badge of Courage, required reading in high school, and a pair of books by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove and The Streets of Laredo in the early 90s. Don’t remember Red Badge, but I did like the McMurtry books immensely, though I thought the second one was somewhat dour and anticlimactic, as if the writer had suddenly began to dislike the characters he was writing about.

So each time I drove up to my parents’ house, I’d pass the Zane Grey museum and say, “One of these days I’m gonna go there, but first I have to read one or two Zane Grey books.”

Years went by until – you guessed it – I picked up a pair of Zane Grey books.

I finally finished the encyclopedic Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, and I’m still making my way through Shakespeare (got a little bogged down over finding time to view Henry IV). So yesterday I started reading Grey’s famous Riders of the Purple Sage, putting away 40 or so pages fairly quickly. So far it’s an enjoyable read, and reads very much like the screenplay of yer typical cowboy flick. After Riders I have another of his to read, one of his posthumous ones, so it may be of dubious quality, and a slim novel The Long Riders. I seem to recall the latter as the title of a movie; don’t know right now if the two are related or not.

N.B. – Very, very busy this week for reasons I will divulge tomorrow! Good news! But the posts this week may be a little on the short side. Bear with me, and keep coming back!