My favorite book by an American author is Lonesome Dove. The other books in that series are also wonderful.

"Books" is not fiction but a look at the author's love of books and collecting books. This may be of more interest to the people with similar interests.

Larry McMurtry's "Books" is very focused on his career as a Bookman, and, as he intended, gives little insight into his life other than as related to this part of his profession. For lover's of books it is a delightful, fast read. I enjoyed finding out about this part of Larry McMurtry's thinking and the fascinating details of "Bookmanship."

It was fascinating to discover that an author of western novels, Larry McMurtry, is also a used book dealer! With a title like this and the McMurtry name, this book will be bought by every librarian looking for a book that encourages readership. Unfortunately, it is a little more specialized than the average reader would expect. If you enjoy collecting, it's a book to borrow from the library. A more accurate title would have been Reminisces of an Antiquarian Book Dealer. From that standpoint, this is a great book! And the format is one that any dealer in antiques and rarities could utilize in writing their memoirs.

After selling over a million used books and still having an inventory approaching 400,000 books (including 28,000 in his personal residence), at age 72, Larry McMurtry must have realized he needed to move some more books or risk a haunting fear that the remaining stock could go for four cents a book! What better way to advertise his bookstore than this description of his book dealing days and his comment that lots of desirable books are still sitting on his shelves carrying prices that are a quarter century old.

What makes this book worthwhile is learning why people collect books and what makes a great library. To Larry, the fun is coming across an important or exciting book he has never owned! This is probably how most dealers in antiquities feel. As he states, "First one has to find such a book; then one has to recognize it for what it is." Unfortunately, rare book investing may not be for everyone. McMurtry gives the example of a book by a Belgian surrealist that he bought as part of a collection of several thousand exhibition catalogues. He quickly resold it for $36. Today, an inscribed copy is estimated to bring at auction, $60,000 to $80,000! Unfortunately, the book may not be for everybody, it is about an exhibition of dolls wrapped in barbed wire!

As often is the case, no dealer can know everything. Sometimes, a rare book is nothing more than a pamphlet. Other times, it's the dust wrapper that brings great value. An example given was a dust wrapper copy of The Great Gatsby that Larry bought forty years ago for $12; just as the most sought after modern books began their spectacular rise. With America now having 946 billionaires running around with money to spend on things of value, McMurtry feels there can be no ceiling and this pricey rarity recently hit $168,000!

McMurtry describes buying real libraries containing thousands of books as alchemy, "One looks, one guesses...." Making a bid you can live with and the seller will accept. Case in point, when starting out, Larry had $1500 in the bank, offered $1500 for a library and when all was done realized $10,000 reselling the books. Another example was hastily appraising a library of 16,000 books at $200,000 for the IRS - a little more than $12 a book. What keeps the reader whipping through is his chapters are so short that you think, "Why not read one more?" After reading this book, the collector/investor realizes it is pretty difficult for the average book lover to put together a rare book library that will grow in value.

Larry McMurtry has had as great an influence on books and movies as any living writer over the last half-century. From THE LAST PICTURE SHOW to LONESOME DOVE, he has penned 30 novels and 41 books, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. As a Hollywood screenwriter he won an Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain and has written 70 scripts.

Who would have guessed, as he tells us in BOOKS: A Memoir, that by the mid-1970s "Writing was my vocation, but I had written a lot, and it was no longer exactly a passion." And this was years before LONESOME DOVE and decades before Brokeback Mountain.

BOOKS: A Memoir is the story of McMurtry's real passion in life: book buying and selling. Over the years he has handled at least a million volumes as a bookseller. He owned a bookstore in Washington, D.C. for 36 years and now has turned his hometown of Archer City, Texas, into a book town where he owns six buildings, five of them filled with books. Indeed, you have a choice of 300,000 volumes to purchase when you enter his store, the appropriately titled Booked Up.

But you probably won't be able to find a latte or scone for sale in the joint. BOOKS: A Memoir is a beautifully written look into the still existing but little known world of antiquarian book dealers. And unfortunately, it soon might be a Lost World, grinded down beneath chain stores and a generation raised on Gameboys, not the Hardy Boys.

This work also gives us insights into the making of a great American writer. Who but McMurtry could write such a perfect sentence: "I don't remember either of my parents ever reading me a story --- perhaps that's why I've made up so many."

There were no books around his Texas ranch house in his earliest years, but then at the age of six, a cousin going off to World War II gave him a treasure --- a box containing 19 books. His life was forever changed. In his isolated rural setting, he tells us, "I came to reading before I came to American popular culture generally..."

McMurtry devoured his cousin's books multiple times and soon, as a young man, was searching through musty old bookstores, looking for books to read. He describes coming across shelves of Modern Library classics in Lovelace's Bookshop in Archer City and being filled "with a mixture of awe and fear." I was reminded of Pete Hamill's description of the awe he felt as a young boy exploring the Brooklyn Public Library and discovering THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. I wonder how much kids lose today when they don't have a similar experience. Not to mention our cultural life.

Soon McMurtry progresses from book scout to bookseller. As a young writer, Hollywood buys one of his early books and turns it into the movie Hud. And instead of purchasing a jazzy car and fancy house, like many of us writers would, his work in films will help him buy all or part of 30 bookstores over the years.

The antiquarian bookseller is like a deep sea fisherman, searching through garage sales, estate sales and auctions for the profitable find. And there is always the big fish that got away, such as when McMurtry sells a rare book, unknowingly for $45, and it ends up later being sold for $5,000.

We meet some of the wonderfully eccentric characters in this world, characters who could easily fill a McMurtry novel. For example, there is the English bookseller Anthony Newnham. McMurtry writes:

"Anthony Newnham tended to marry against type. His first wife, I am told, was a proper English housewife --- thus, in America, he usually went for wild, drug taking, motorcycle girls...Anthony's method...was to marry wild American girls and turn them into proper English housewives --- if they submitted to this change he rapidly lost interest. He was a very attractive man, even though, for a time, he had no front teeth, these having been knocked out by a cricket ball when he was nine. He lost his bridge and, for some years, didn't bother to replace it."

There are gems of great writing like this throughout the book. And we learn that in all his decades of operating a major bookshop in the Georgetown district of the nation's capital, "we sold only one real book to a member of Congress." Now there is a shock!

But for as much joy as there is in this book about books, there is also a subtle sadness. After all, the antiquarian book dealer makes his living when people die and their precious libraries are broken up and sold by relatives. McMurtry calls this "the silent migration of books." Then, there is the death of independent bookstores all over the country, driven out of business by the ubiquitous chains. Great old stores like Discover in San Francisco, the Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles and the Phoenix Bookshop in New York City appear in these pages. All gone forever, part of the Lost World. Even McMurtry's own shop in DC eventually gave way to a Pottery Barn of all insults.

McMurtry writes a simple yet beautiful sentence to describe when family members end up breaking up personal libraries that took years of hard labor to amass and gave endless satisfaction to their owners: "Something was over, and that was that."

But for those of us who have made a living in the word business, McMurtry's wonderful little book comes at a time when we, unimaginably, find ourselves thinking not about retirement plans but whether books and their cousins in serving civilization, newspapers, may be the thing that is over. So far in 2008, 6,000 journalists have lost their jobs and some newspaper stocks have dropped by 84% over the past year. The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a week. The business is dying.

And for those of us who must supplement our writing income not by selling books but by teaching college kids, we soon learn the depressing truth of America in 2008: young people are not reading either newspapers or books. McMurtry acknowledges this:

"I nowadays have a feeling that not only are most bookmen eccentrics, but even the act they support --- reading --- is an eccentricity now, if a mild one." But he remains optimistic about the future. He writes, "Very quickly, once I had my 19 books, I realized that reading was the cheapest and most stable pleasure in life. Sometimes books excite me, sometimes they sustain me, but rarely do they disappoint me --- as books, that is, if not necessarily the poetry, history, or fiction that they contain."

One can only hope that another young person will one day wander into one of the musty old bookstores remaining, pick up a book that has existed for centuries and be filled with awe and captivated by the magic that is books. Upon that child, the fate of this democracy and perhaps even our civilization may just depend.

For anybody who loves books and reading, BOOKS: A Memoir will be a great read and a treasured addition to your personal library.

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

The IDEA of a book about books by Larry McMurtry is utterly compelling. The moment I saw it, I "one-clicked" it. The editorial reviews which describe the book as being what the common McMurtry lover (me) expected, must have scanned the first 30 or so pages and written on reputation. This is a bewilderingly awful book, for all the negative reasons mentioned in other reviews.

I regret to report that this is a mediocre book. And, with the exceedingly sparse printing per page, it also borders on a publishing rip-off. It purports to be a memoir of McMurtry's life with books -- both reading books and buying and selling books as a second-hand book dealer. But there is much more of the latter than the former. Weird bibliophile that I am, I happen to like good memoirs of rare and second-hand booksellers, but I don't think most people do, and this one does not really qualify as "good".

Perhaps McMurtry had promised himself or a publisher that some day he would write such a memoir, but when he finally got around to doing it, he no longer had the requisite energy. In any event, BOOKS: A MEMOIR seems to be the product of, at best, a half-hearted effort. (McMurtry's recent articles in "The New York Review of Books" show more time and effort than this book.)

To elaborate on the publishing rip-off: the book consists of 109 very short chapters, each of which begins one-third of the way down an odd-numbered page, regardless where the previous chapter had ended. Thus, there are many completely blank pages as well as many other pages with at best a third of a page of text. Although there are 259 numbered pages in the book, there are less than 160 pages of actual text. At $24.00 retail, that is pretty niggardly.

I can't imagine BOOKS: A MEMOIR appealing to anyone other than a Larry McMurtry completist or groupie. (Are there any such folks? Maybe so, to judge from some of the other reviews). Even for those, like me, afflicted with bibliomania, it is disappointing. It pales in comparison to McMurtry's earlier memoir, "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen." I rather doubt that BOOKS will be a much prized or sought-for item in whatever second-hand book stores there are fifty years hence.

If you're looking for a book about the love of reading (as I was when I bought this book), this is not the book for you. If, however, you enjoy anecdotes about the who's who of the antiquarian book trade, pick this one up.

Larry McMurtry is tired, ornery, depressed.

He worries that people don't read much anymore. He stopped reading fiction, for the most part, 20 years ago. He likes British political biography, the diaries of minor British aristocrats, (mostly) British travel writers, and of course the history of the American West (on which he has written and reviewed wonderfully), although there isn't really any of that here.

He is a book collector. Personally, I don't understand the collector mentality and find it annoying. He wonders why most people would care to read that he found such-and-such a book for $1 in 1956 in a garage and now it fetches $12,000 at Christie's. He is right to wonder, as are his editors and publishers. (Perhaps this is the last "book" of a multi-book deal?)

Over the years, Larry McMurtry has run into some colorful characters and come across rare books in book shops and at auctions. He relates a few humorous anecdotes about such people and things in a way that makes them not very funny. He summarizes the existences of a number of book stores and their owners/collectors (which should be interesting, but is not).

This latest effort reads like a series of notes for a book. Or the draft of a magazine article. It is randomly assembled and poorly edited. (By this I mean the editors should have told him, No, Please Give Us Something Approaching a Book!) Eventually, I started skimming for obscure book recommendations, and even found a few. The one surprise here is that McMurtry had and/or has large collections of comics and soft pornographic novels over the years. And he considers Pynchon's V a "masterpiece."

Most tellingly, and in defense of the title of my review, he repeats, very often, anecdotes from his great book-length essay, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Please, if you read this review, and haven't read that, DO NOT read Books, but rather go and get yourself a copy of Dairy Queen instead.

This work is a collection of unedited ramblings that jump around after a strong start. I suspect the author dictated while fondling books from off the shelves. It is a work inferior to others published under his name.

If "Dairy Queen" brought you to this book, you might end up being disappointed. The book is a series of 1 to 4 page anecdotes.

Some of the pages in the copy I had kept sticking together while I was reading and therefore there were times when I would move from one anecdote to another without completely reading one piece and in many instance I felt like skipping over but did not.

There are fish stories and there are personality stories, but there is no center to this narration, it goes on. if it had been a series of blogs, it might have been powerful...not sure whether the author's desire to kindle interest in books would really happen through this book.

I came to know McMurtry as many did through his excellent novel Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Simon & Schuster Classics). Then I learned I already knew him through the many screenplays and novels he has written that became major motion pictures: Hud, The Last Picture Show (Definitive Director's Cut Special Edition), Terms of Endearment to name a few. I have since read most of what he has written. I heard he owned an eclectic used antique book store filled with many hard to find books many collector items, his novel Cadillac Jack : A Novel was about an antique book scout. So I was interested to read this memoir of McMurtry's life as a bookman. I use the term Bookman because you don't have to be a writer to be a bookman. McMurtry's simple mastery of the language is again on display as he takes on his journey of becoming a book scout and collector. The characters he meets and the places he travels are brought vividly to life. He ends up opening used book stores that carry rare and collectable editions, the eclectic of which is the one he opens in his home town of Archer City Texas (also the setting for the last Picture show, and subsequent sequels). McMurtry gives the reader an adventurous and some time comic look into the world of those who collect and covet rare books, a world inhabited by some strange birds! What I enjoyed most about this book, however, was the insight into how the many books he has read has formed his literary outlook and influenced his writings ( I have more than I few new books on my to be read list after finishing this book). This is a book I will read more than once.

I learned a lot of interesting things from this book about the bookselling business. If you want a quick, intelligent read for summer, this would work. And Chapter 29, about the adventures of C. Dorman David, is worth the price of the book.

But as I neared the end of the book, I realized that there wasn't that much about the average reader who looks for particular books to read and treasure. For example, Ludwig Lewisohn's 1932 book Expression in America talks about forgotten classics like George Frederic Hummel's Subsoil and Ruth Suckow's The Odyssey of a Nice Girl. I happily discovered both of those books at the big John King bookstore in downtown Detroit.

There's nothing in McMurtry's book about bookstore visitors like me. He seems to be most interested in wealthy bookowners who buy books as much for show as for reading pleasure. For a book about the enthusiastic everyday reader, I'd recommend Christopher Morley's two classics, Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop.

If you are a dedicated reader and book collector,this memoir will seem like balm.In truth,book collecting is a polite compulsion, and McMurtry ( who is a genuinely humble man for all his success) assures us that our insanity,though incurable,is widely shared.No one can read this book and not dream of driving to Archer,Texas to browse the author's collection of hundreds of thousands of books.The ultimate gift of this memoir is to make plain to the reader that their outlandish interest in everything marks he/ she as an ambassador of reason.

Larry McMurtry (now age 72) has a long-established and well-honored career as an author and Hollywood screenwriter (including winning an Oscar for "Brokeback Mountain"), but for some reason it had never occurred to him that people might want to read about his joy of and for books, and collecting them. That has finally corrected with this book.

In "Books: A Memoir" (259 pages), McMurtry brings his tales of how he fell in love reading books, growing up in Archer City, TX, and how that love eventually lead to becoming a book scout, dealer and eventually book store owner, Booked Up in Georgetown, in DC, starting in the early 70s. The book is a delight to read from start to finish, bringing out his love for reading (and writing) but just as importantly collecting. In that sense, this could be applied to many other fields (as I love scouring used vinyl and CD bins for that rare album find). The book is made up of 108 chapters, which fly by mostly in a couple of pages. His memories of what it was like to scout for books in the 60s and 70s are just a delight.

McMurtry and his business partner eventually established the Booked Up store in Washington, more specifically on 31th & M in Georgetown. What memories this brings back to me. I was a grad student in Washington in the mid-80s, and remember going there, not buying much, but simply amazed at the wealth of books in the store. As McMurthy describes in the book, Booked Up left Georgetown (due primarily to rising lease expenses) and is now in his home town of Archer City, TX. Not sure that I will make it out there anytime soon. That said, "Books: A Memoir" is a fantastic read. Highly recommended!

If one of the purposes of a book is to leave an impression of one kind or another, McMurtry's "Books" accomplished just that. I found this book to be a satisfying and influential read that left me curious and desiring to be a book collector. The stories are entertaining, educational, vividly portrayed, and descriptive. Like most of his books, I felt drawn into the world of which he was writing and wanted to be a part of that world.

This is a typical reaction to the writing of Larry McMurtry. Having met Mr. McMurty and experienced a conversation about books with him, I enjoyed hearing his voice in my head as he described the years of book collecting, buying and selling, and the multiple encounters with various characters. Without being preachy or philosophical, McMurtry tends to make the reader draw his own conclusions or judgments about people's actions and behavior. His objective and almost random interjections of difficulties and successes in book trading make "Books" a fascinating study in development of this admirable profession. Added to this study is a smooth prose with an eclectic and seamless blend of common and academic style--making it appropriate for all kinds of people.

I found this book to be a fascinating look at book collecting with an obvious love of books shining forth from beginning to end. Although I did find the ending to be rather anticlimactic, typical of McMurtry's style incidentally, throughout the book I found myself wanting to be there and experience similar events.

I am giving this book 4 stars due to the tendency to have too many names and events that didn't always add to the overall direction of the book. Overall, a worthwhile reading experience and I have yet to be disappointed with a McMurtry book.

I love almost all of McMurtry's work as well as books about books, so I was eagerly anticipating loving this book. It was a smooth and somewhat entertaining read, but I have to admit feeling a little let down.

It is not a memoir in almost any sense of the word, but more of a collection of war stories about the buying and selling of books. There was some autobiographical material in the book, but not enough to satisfy me. The book seemed to peter out near the end and ended a little abruptly for me. The final chapter almost seemed like an after-thought.

Still, McMurtry is an accomplished author and I'd probably read his grocery list if he published it. It was an enjoyable read that left me vaguely dissatisfied.

I just finished reading this book and I come away disappointed. While there are a few semi-interesting anecdotes, in total they do not make for much of a book. There are so many better books about bookselling and bibliophiles. Nicholas Basbanes is the master of this subject. I'm surprised this book was even published but I guess the publisher decided they could play off the McMurtry "brand" to an admiring but unsuspecting public. Larry McMurtry should have followed his own advice about writers writing past their prime.

Larry McMurtry writes of his long career as a bookman. He loves his personal library, the feel of hardbacks, and the small independent bookstores that dot the land. (There being fewer of these dots of late.)

Having wanted to read at least one book by this noted author, I bought and enjoyed this one. While it is well written, its limited story line does jump around at the obvious whim of the author.

I do not share Mr. McMurtry's dark concern that the common reader may just be fading away or his view that, somehow, small bookstores are central to the reading experience. So long as good books are written, I am confident there will be readers. Where they should choose to grab hold of a book is of little matter.

Some of the happiest times of my life were when my wife and I traveled throughout the west and stopped at every used book store we came across. We slept in the back of our truck and used the little extra money we had for books. As Mr. McMurtry writes, there's more to the enjoyment of books than reading from the first page to the last.

Those of us who love books are, I think, always excited when we run across an accomplished author who shares our bibliomania and writes about it in a loving and erudite way. Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove and "Brokeback Mountain" fame has done precisely this in his wonderful memoir Books.

Books is a memoir that traces McMurtry's life stages through his relationship with books--thousands and thousands of them, those in the library of the university he attended, those in his personal library (upwards of 30,000 volumes), those in his used and antiquarian bookstore Booked Up (300,000 and counting). Books have enriched his inner life and helped him hone his skills as an author. But they've also enriched his economic existence too, since he's been in the used book trade for nearly half a century now (something I didn't know until reading this memoir). His first book sale in 1962, for example, paid for his first son's birth.

One of the reasons I so like McMurtry's book is that it reminds me of my own life trajectory. McMurtry tells us that he was raised in an utterly bookless Texas ranch house. He never owned a book until 1942, when a guy headed off to war gave him a box of adventure stories. McMurtry was eight years old, and the minute he got the taste of the printed word in his mouth, he never looked back. I spent much of my childhood in a similarly bookless wasteland (in the south, not the southwest), and as I read McMurtry's description of his growing excitement, absorption, and sense of liberation in the magic of books once he discovered them, it was as if I was reading about myself. And, like all good books about books, this one makes me want to read books it mentions. It also makes me want read the novels of McMurtry's I haven't gotten around to yet and get myself to Texas to browse in Booked Up.

McMurtry's Books uses stories about book-collecting, book-selling, and book-enjoying as milestones for his autobiography. His memoir not only tells us something about his own life, but also shares a lot of delightful stories about fellow booksellers and bibliophiles. (My favorite is about the California-based bookseller who kept binoculars in his shop so that customers could read the titles on the top shelves.) There's a certain nostalgic melancholy in the memoir too, because one senses--and so does McMurtry--that the used bookshop is becoming quaint and endangered in our age of huge chain retailers of books.

McMurtry started out bookless, but he's gone a long way since then. He brought a huge bookstore to a town (New Archer, Texas) that he says was as utterly bookless as his childhood home, and he's brought several excellent books of his own to the rest of us. (With typical modesty, he tells us in Books that although a few of his own novels have been "really good," none are great.) Books: A Memoir is his latest gift to us all.

Five stars.