Drop that sunset-purple cowboy hat on your head and ride off into the actual sunset now. A bit of bling with the newt ring for Call’s potential (and very likely) child a steer skull necklace because a cattle herd is the whole reason Gus, Call, and the others are trekking north and those fabulous Winchester stud earrings because every cowboy needs a reliable pistol, especially Call. I wanted to make sure I included plenty of wooden elements since, as fellow Rioter Nikki reminded me, there’s a pretty important wooden sign that keeps popping up – you’ll just have to rent your pigs elsewhere 😉 So we have the wooden framed sunglasses, a wooden watch, and a wooden phone case. I added some “Clara” boots for Gus’s one true love, a pair of horse print panties because, uh, horse print panties, and a “Montana” bag for the cowboy’s final destination. Don’t forget to throw on a suede western style jacket for those chilly nights around the campfire. Let’s start with the “Mex Tex” dress for the actual location of the border town from which the novel takes its name.

One of my favorites for capturing the fading legacy of the American West. This round of Book Style is all about McMurtry’s modern classic, Lonesome Dove. I have a soft spot for Charles Portis, Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy, Patrick deWitt, and, of course, Larry McMurtry. I read my way through all of Laura Ingalls and Rose Wilder’s books in elementary school a couple of times. I really appreciate a good western novel. Books have always been different for me, though. A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtrys Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. As an adult, I’ve tried time and again to get into them and it seems like I can tolerate True Grit (the 2010 one) and the Shanghai Western mash-up genre. Nominated as one of Americas best-loved novels by PBSs The Great American Read. I cringed internally every time a cousin excitedly turned on another episode of Little House on the Prairie or suggested a John Wayne classic for movie night. Most of my mother’s family loves westerns.

Lonesome dove novel