Larry McMurtry reflects on what he sees as the end of reading

A life in books
Larry McMurtry reflects on what he sees as the end of reading

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

As newspaper empires fold and printing presses go digital, author Larry McMurtry’s affection for his first love and life’s passion remains unchanged, though increasingly more guarded and protected. The man is in the book business, and business, in his opinion, is beyond bad.

“My theme is a sad one,” McMurtry ’60 said grimly. “It’s the end of reading. I had always thought that books may end, but reading would not. I’m not so sure anymore. It’s a mistake to assume that it will go on forever because there doesn’t seem to be anything that goes on forever.”

	JEFF FITLOW
	Alumnus Larry McMurtry headlined the 2009 Friends of Fondren Distinguished Lecture Series at Rice University Jan. 21.

That’s a hard fact to swallow for the author of 29 novels who has built his life around reading and writing. When he was 6, he had his first library: a box of 19 books his cousin left when he blew through town on his way to enlist in the Army.

“I picked a book out of that box and have been reading ever since,” McMurtry said. “I’d play hooky from the first grade to read. Reading has been my life.”

It’s a way of life that’s crumbling, according to McMurtry, who was at Rice University Jan. 21 headlining the 2009 Friends of Fondren Distinguished Lecture Series. More than 700 people attended the standing-room only lecture from the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove.” His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs and more than 30 screenplays, including co-authorship of “Brokeback Mountain,” for which he received an Academy Award.

When bookshops stop

In addition to being a voracious reader and prolific writer, he owns bookstores that deal in rare books. In the business for about 55 years now, he has amassed more than 350,000 books to fill out the white shelves of his Archer City, Texas, bookstore where he grew up.

“In a quarter century, I bought more than 30 bookshops,” McMurtry said. “When this phenomenon began, I didn’t worry much about it. I thought it was a shift in the book market. I didn’t realize it was a whole shift in the cultural world.”

Friends of Fondren Library
Want to support reading at Fondren Library? Find out how you can help
McMurtry attributed the decline to the aftermath of the dot-com bubble peak in March 2000.

“The year before that, I sold a million dollars’ worth of books. Overnight it stopped. And now it’s been stopped for a space of years.”

The availability of books for download has squelched the need for the physical objects, and the accessibility of the Internet has replaced the need to dig for information in books, according to McMurtry.

“I took too lightly the threat posed by Internet technology,” McMurtry said. “It is now possible to buy books — good books, fairly expensive books — for one penny on the Internet. It’s a degradation, in my belief.”

New technologies

Questioners in the audience challenged that the new accessibility of reading material — through technologies like Kindle and Amazon.com — has reinvented and renewed interest in the written word.

McMurtry was not so sure. “If there’s a better tool, people are going to use it, but there is a sadness that it ends up depriving people,”  he said.

The Rice alumnus said that now people take to Google to find quick information and thus miss out on the serendipitous experience of walking into a bookstore looking for one thing and coming out with a wealth of information on that topic and others.

“It’s just sad that what is being left behind is a very beautiful culture, the culture of the book. I think it’s gone, I don’t think it will come back,” he said. “My bookshop has become a temple. It’s not a commercial real estate anymore. They come in and hold a book as if they’re holding a talismanic object from a past culture. And, in a way, they are.”

But those in the audience clutching worn copies of “The Last Picture Show” and “Lonesome Dove” didn’t seem to feel that way. Instead, they expressed how much a part of their lives the books, McMurtry’s books, remain.

Going, going

One Rice student said the very first paperback book she read was “The Last Picture Show.”

Another student said, “It’s tremendous to have you here at Rice. You’re my grandfather’s favorite author. I still remember the yellow copy of ‘Lonesome Dove’ that he used to read when I was little.”

And another, a graduate student, dressed in a cowboy hat and boots, said, “I spent eight years being on the rodeo circuit, so I’ve seen many copies of your books on the dashboard of a pickup.”

For McMurtry, those thoughts provide some solace but can’t shake his overwhelming fear that the world he grew up in — the world of page-turners, typewriters and hardbound novels — will end before he does.

As he read Philip Larkin’s poem “Going, Going” to the audience, he got choked up and said, “I felt that sense when I first began to read. That ‘this will last my lifetime.’ Well, it ain’t gonna, and I’m sorry.”