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 [b:The Last Picture Show|25418971|The Last Picture Show|Larry McMurtry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1429883635l/25418971.SY75.jpg|1069014] came out in 1966 and takes place in a small Texas town in 1951. If you've heard of it, it's probably because it was made into a successful movie by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971. It was in black and white, an uncommon choice for directors at that time, and is the movie that made Sybil Shepherd a star. (It was her film debut.)
 I'd guess there are people who dislike [a:Larry McMurtry|1055|Larry McMurtry|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1540995857p2/1055.jpg]'s work or, if not that, sniff at it as they would writing by [a:Stephen King|3389|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1362814142p2/3389.jpg] or [a:Elin Hilderbrand|88301|Elin Hilderbrand|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1365687944p2/88301.jpg]. As far as literary fiction goes, I'd put McMurtry above both of them. McMurtry was a story teller like the others. A hundred years from now people aren't going to be dissecting his work like they do that of writers like [a:James Joyce|5144|James Joyce|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615569948p2/5144.jpg] and [a:Leo Tolstoy|128382|Leo Tolstoy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651443031p2/128382.jpg] in search of great philosophical content, but they might when wanting to show how people lived in a particular era and how post World War II authors told stories.
 In my case, McMurtry's books cast a spell over me and they're the kind of books that make me put off doing laundry or getting ready for bed because I simply want to keep reading them.
 Worth mentioning is that The Last Picture Show has a surprising amount of sex in it of the kind you would expect high school boys and girls to engage in (petting in movie theaters; going all the way on a school trip) and the kind most wouldn't expect (rural boys and farm animals). If it's in your high school's library, expect it to be banned soon, depending on where you live.
Excerpt:

 Jacy and Lester had not been gone from the dance ten minutes before word got around that they were going to a swimming party where everyone would be naked. The reason word got around so fast was that Lester told several of the younger kids about it just before he left. He told them he and Jacy were going to swim naked, just like everybody else. It was almost past belief, but when the kids saw him actually drive away with Jacy they instantly believed it and began to talk about it. Nothing wilder had ever been heard of in Thalia—it was even wilder than actually making out, because that was customarily done in the dark and nothing much could be seen.

 [a:Sarah Thankam Mathews|18647970|Sarah Thankam Mathews|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1678202915p2/18647970.jpg]'s first novel, [b:All This Could Be Different|59627478|All This Could Be Different|Sarah Thankam Mathews|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1661517709l/59627478.SY75.jpg|88378302], might as well be a work of science fiction to me. I mean this as a high compliment. It's largely about people in their twenties who live in Milwaukee around 2013 and their efforts at sorting out who they are.
 The narrator is so unsure of who she is she can't stand hearing others use her first name. Despite how unrelated their lives are to mine—an East Coast white guy in his mid-60s —there were flashes of things that were so similar to my own experience that they more than closed any distance between the characters and me. The crappy building manager, the awful boss, cars that don't work, lost apartment keys, a bad job market, hangovers, dental worries, running out of money, mild food insecurity, complicated relationships.
 Not that it was all bad for me or for this novel's protagonist. A few days ago I saw a [a:Fran Lebowitz|8127311|Fran Lebowitz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1536147926p2/8127311.jpg] quote in which she said if you didn't have fun when you were in your twenties you never will. The people in All This Could Be Different do have fun.
 As much as it's about what I mentioned above, it's also a story of immigration, in this case from India. The main character is a twenty-three-year-old woman originally from there.
There are some steamy passages in it, the kind I don't see in books by men these days, and that makes sense. The kind of sex straight sex men describe is abundant online and descriptions of it are uninteresting to most readers. About half the main characters in All This Could Be Different are lesbians, and the proper depiction of that kind of sex doesn't often make it into mainstream books.
 Mathew writes wonderfully. There was at least one phrase on every page that astonished me.
 Excerpt:

 From Tig I learned that Thom was doing poorly. He had been taking his feelings out on Isabel, and Isabel, who knew her worth in the larger scheme of the world, had tearfully demanded a relationship break and had a friend drive her home to Minnesota. In the wake of this, and at Tig's urging, he had been to see a psychiatrist. This person gave him pills to make him less desperate and sad, to still the eddies of panic that pulled him into their vortices. So far he'd scored one interview with a company that sold paper goods. They gave the gig, an entry-level position, to somebody with seven years of experience. Four hundred people had applied.

 [a:Emily St. John Mandel|2786093|Emily St. John Mandel|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1576606299p2/2786093.jpg]'s [b:Sea of Tranquility|58446227|Sea of Tranquility|Emily St. John Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626710416l/58446227.SX50.jpg|92408226] is a fun book to read with lots going on for such a short book (255 pages, with lots of air) that I read in just three days, which is rare for me, but don't approach it as regular sci-fi if you're big on that genre. Not much of that makes real sense.
 The story relies on time travel, which I doubt will ever be possible and if it ever is it should be banned as much as possible. Once you step on that one butterfly ...
 The time travel links a few plot lines, most of which make satisfying little tales on their own, especially, to me, the first one. The stories probably mesh to a greater degree than I'm aware of, but I am too dumb to get it.
 I enjoyed reading it anyway.
 There is clearly a lot of autobiographical stuff in here St. John Mandel packed in to get off her chest, especially an extended bit on book tours. Good reading, but I have to hope that men (mostly) won't say the idiotic things they do now in the year 2203.
Excerpt:

 "I was so confused by your book," a woman in Dallas said. "There were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn't, ultimately. They just ended. I was like"—she was some distance away, in the darkened audience, but Olive saw that she was miming flipping through a book and running out of pages—"I was just like, Huh? Is this book missing pages? It just ended."

 I read recently a critic saying that as good as [a:Larry McMurtry|1055|Larry McMurtry|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1540995857p2/1055.jpg]'s [b:Lonesome Dove|34856|Lonesome Dove|Larry McMurtry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1168573116l/34856.SY75.jpg|3281465] was, the western genre as a whole promulgates a toxic form of American masculinity. It's easy to dismiss this kind of thing as overly woke, but I think the point is valid.
( Maybe my openness to that idea is being shaped by the series of mass shootings that have taken place in the four days prior to my writing this, in late January of 2023.)
 [b:The Last Kind Words Saloon|23316537|The Last Kind Words Saloon|Larry McMurtry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413746287l/23316537.SX50.jpg|25994998] shows the ending of the cowboy era in many ways, especially the last few pages. It focuses on Wyatt Earp and the famed shooting at the OK Corral. The novel is a short one at just 196 pages. The chapters are short with a lot of air. It's like a little dose of Lonesome Dove. McMurtry wrote many more westerns but I think I'll read more of his non-westerns the next time I read his work.

 I had fun reading [a:Elin Hilderbrand|88301|Elin Hilderbrand|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1365687944p2/88301.jpg]'s [b:Summer of '69|42283286|Summer of '69|Elin Hilderbrand|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1540085775l/42283286.SY75.jpg|66244148] largely because I was just miles from where most of the action takes place—Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Island—during that summer. I was eleven years old. The main character in this, Jessie, is thirteen.
 Hilderbrand is described as the Queen of Beach Books, and she's happy with that description.
 I read its four hundred and twenty-odd pages in six days, which is a pace at which I don't read anything. (Just think—I'd have read War and Peace in one month instead of seven!) It moves, for the most part, smoothly, though there were a few plot points that could have used some refining. Early on, for example, there's a scene with Jessie and a school counselor. At the end, the school counselor shows up again in a fairly significant way and you wonder why. (That might be less a problem with the book than with me. I have a mental block when it comes to remembering the names of fictional characters.)
 There are a few anachronisms, starting with the front and back cover photos. New England beaches are rocky; you wouldn't drive a Mustang on them, and surfing wasn't done there then, though it may be now during the hurricane season. Neon yellow tennis balls weren't around until 1972 and weren't common even then, no matter how tony the club (they weren't used at Wimbledon until 1986). Sweat bands on wrists and heads also weren't a thing in 1969. Also, the type of feminism you see in some of the college-age characters wasn't prevalent then. Ms. Magazine debuted in 1972. It would have been extremely uncommon for a nineteen-year-old to correct an older person for referring women her age as girls. Finally, the novel is a year early when it comes to American involvement in Cambodia.
 A few financial matters don't add up either. One daughter worries about getting the $3,000 needed to take a semester abroad while her mothers buys a huge house on Nantucket Island.
 That's just my usual fussiness, though, and it didn't ruin the book for me. I got it in the free rack at my local library, which, by the way, says good things about the book, not bad: It means they had many copies of it because so many people wanted to read it.

 The most puzzling thing about [a:Anthony Marra|5989255|Anthony Marra|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1650470662p2/5989255.jpg]'s [b:Mercury Pictures Presents|59109471|Mercury Pictures Presents|Anthony Marra|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1653944786l/59109471.SY75.jpg|93011532] to me is that I didn't see it on everyone's top ten works of fiction of 2022. It's brilliant and informative. I don't particularly like show business novels, but to call this one of those is inaccurate.
 It mostly takes place during World War II in California and Italy.
 Mercury Pictures has enough wit for four books. It's consistently very funny without being snarky.
 Here's an excerpt in which the main character Artie, a movie studio head, reflects on parenthood and his young son, who has been urinating in Artie's laundry hamper:

 Having kids in this country ... you might as well open a looney bin for uninsured anarchists. The noise, mess, and mutiny, they were goddamned rabble-rousers, his three kids, protesting everything from bedtime to vegetables. Every parent is a failed dictator; it was nearly enough to inspire admiration for the real ones. A few years back, before Mussolini joined himself to Hitler's hip like a colostomy bag, Artie had read Il Duce's autobiography for parenting tips. It was written in semiliterate bombast, its pages damp with autocratic spittle, the reading experience akin to literary lobotomy, and yet, Mussolini's leadership style made for inspired parenting ideas. Artie had imposed curfews and pledges of fealty. But here you had Billy, performing nocturnal reconnoitering of Artie's laundry hamper like a resistance fighter ready to blow the railway depot. If Artie wasn't so embarrassed, he might have been halfway proud of the little renegade.

 [a:Eley Williams|15163114|Eley Williams|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1617582781p2/15163114.jpg]'s [b:The Liar's Dictionary|53284801|The Liar's Dictionary|Eley Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1594618149l/53284801.SX50.jpg|64196454] is a fun book to read. She is genuinely funny, but not in that jokey way that wears you out when reading books by comedians about parenthood and marriage. This book is about words, which sounds dull, but it's not.
 There are two stories, sort of, and they're about two people with strong connections who are separated by 120 years. They're neat stories but they're almost secondary to the writing, which is fine.
 The Liar's Dictionary reminded me of [a:Tom Rachman|3066198|Tom Rachman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1516813110p2/3066198.jpg]'s [b:The Imperfectionists|6834410|The Imperfectionists|Tom Rachman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327935648l/6834410.SY75.jpg|7045390] in some ways, the main one being that I didn't want either to end. It's also the only book you'll read that uses words you don't know the meaning of that won't make you feel bad about that. (Examples: psithurism: the sound of rustling leaves; apricide: the killing of boars; runkle: to wrinkle or crease; apricity: the warmth of the sun in winter.)
Excerpt:

 My task for the day was to look over David Swansby's efforts at digitising the text of Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It was his dream to honour the family name and the scope and vision of his forefather editors by updating the unfinished dictionary and putting it all online for free. He spoke of this as a noble project, for the betterment of humanity, and as a way of securing the Swansby legacy as something accomplished and celebrated rather than a noble damp squib.
 Privately, I looked up the entry for hubris (n.).

 Well, it took many months but I finished the damn thing. It was like climbing a mountain but instead of a life-changing view at the end there was a thirty-six page essay on history and historians, power and freedom, written in the dense prose you'd find in a philosophy book. Why Tolstoy didn't publish that separately is a mystery to me. It's almost like he wanted you to hate him.
 I understand why many are passionate about this book, which is one third novel, one third history textbook and one third philosophy book, and reading it once is not enough, but I won't be reading it again. As I neared the end, I realized that there wasn't one moment during the time I was reading it that I enjoyed it. I'm not saying books should be light entertainment, but I've learned much from books that I've enjoyed reading. War and Peace was a slog to me.
 A tip if you plan to tackle it: Write down the first and last names of the main characters presented in the beginning on an index card and use that as a bookmark. As you're reading, mentally insert the first or last name (it's usually the last) of the person in the scene you're reading until you know them cold. There are five families and it will help you know what's going on if do this.