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Hi friends 👋,
Happy Tuesday and welcome back from the long weekend!
It’s beautiful out in NYC and it’s time to get back to work. So here’s a short and fun one about why everyone is reading the same old book that I am.
Let’s get to it.
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Everyone is Reading Lonesome Dove
There is a phenomenon called Baader-Meinhof where when you discover something, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s not that the thing is suddenly everywhere; it’s just that you notice it now.
So maybe it is because I’m reading Lonesome Dove that I’ve noticed that everyone is reading Lonesome Dove.
I mentioned the book in a Slack I have with eight friends. One wrote back that he’s reading it now:
Another shared that his mom is reading and loving it:
And three, including the one whose mom is reading it, said that they are going to read it, which makes five people in a group of nine.
This is heartening, because they say that no one is reading anymore. It turns out that people are, just they’re only reading Lonesome Dove.
Let me be clear: Lonesome Dove deserves to be read. It is a Pulitzer Prize winner. If you haven’t, you should go read it right now. But it is also weird that everyone is reading it! It was published in 1985 and won the Pulitzer in 1986.
So Why Is Everyone Reading ‘Lonesome Dove,’ an 858-page Western From 1985? That’s the question that Esquire asked and attempted to answer on March 20th, 2025.
The author, Michael Sebastian, had seen a post on a friend’s Instagram about the book and decided like a year later, driving past a bookstore, that he had to buy it. He tried to figure out why it seemed like everyone was now, like him, reading the book and traced it to a few things:
McMurtry died in September 2023, the same month that a biography about the author and a big story in The New Yorker about him came out. This confluence of factors was likely the spark. The kindling is that all things western are in the Zeitgeist: the Taylor Sheridan universe (Yellowstone, 1923, Landman), the new Netflix show American Primeval, Kevin Costner’s epic Horizon: An American Saga, Pharrell’s western-wear fashion show for Louis Vuitton in January 2024.
Then he asked why it resonated so much and concluded that it was something to do with the fact that it deals with something a lot of men are feeling, which is that we’re never going to be the man we want to be. And maybe! That hasn’t been my experience; I’ve enjoyed the characters and the simplicity of the prose and the unvarnished look at life on the frontier in the 19th century.
But there are a lot of books that might resonate. Why this one? The McMurtry profiles / death timing and Yellowstone / Landman popularity felt like they would have been enough to get a few people to read it, but while I loved both shows, I didn’t know that McMurtry had died (Esquire was wrong, btw; he died in 2021). I didn’t even know that there was a Larry McMurtry.
No, I found Lonesome Dove because I asked Claude to give me a book I wouldn’t be able to put down, and it recommended The Mountain in the Sea, which I’d already read, and Lonesome Dove.
I went back to the source this week to ask Claude to help me understand whether it was responsible for the Doveaissance, and it said kind of but not really, so I asked it to give me a timeline, which it did, but it felt incomplete, so I asked ChatGPT Astra 6, and it delivered a plinko ride through how things spread today.
Basically, the whole thing kicks off with The Ringer. Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald spent COVID Summer (2020) discussing LD on The Watch, culminating in a 2.5 hour megapod.
Then McMurtry, like so many of his characters, died. He left us on March 25, 2021. That summer, Stephen King went on Stephen Colbert’s “What Ya’ Readin?” and said that his favorite book was probably Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. When it later went viral on BookTok (the part of TikTok where people talk about books), a bunch of people said that King’s rec was the reason they picked it up.
I, mind you, didn’t know about any of this, and I suspect you didn’t either. Media is a fragmented thing.
We pick the trail back up in November 2023, when the From the Front Porch podcast picked it as its 2024 “Conquer a Classic” for another group read-along. One participant described reading it alongside “thousands of other readers,” which is more copies than most books sell total.
In June 2024, popular writer Jia Tolentino put Lonesome Dove in The New Yorker’s “What To Read This Summer” list, after having been recommended the book by a friend in 2023. She wrote:
I gasped and sobbed and clutched the book when it was over. I was so thankful for the reminder that reading can still be like this, that the realm of the unread always holds, somewhere, the exact thing I’m looking for, whatever it is.
The next month, in July, Defector’s Tom Ley wrote, It’s Time For You to Read Lonesome Dove, just gushing about the reading experience.
In February 2025, undoubtedly due to the book’s growing popularity and that of the aforementioned Taylor Sheridan Universe, Teton Ridge Entertainment – “THE LEADER IN WESTERN SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT” – acquired the adaptation rights.
On March 6, 2025, another Substacker, Bart Schaneman, wrote Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is the darling of BookTok. It deserves the hype., and wrote:
It seems like every guy with a BookTok or Instagram account about books has either read or is reading Lonesome Dove, and most of them are in agreement that it’s one of the best books that they’ve ever read. Writers I admire like Elisa Gabbert said it was one of her favorites of last year. Kevin Morby has cited it as an influence. Adam Gnade references it. A couple of weeks ago it was announced that someone had bought the rights to all of Larry McMurtry’s novels that include these characters, so expect a streaming series or movies or both.
Later that month, we got the Esquire piece, a cap, it would seem, on the breakout-again success.
I still had not heard about any of this, and none of it is that weird yet. Event-driven word-of-mouth mixed with some genre resurgence and influence from influencers.
In April, the BookTokkers kept coming. This guy, Booksaresick, got 41k likes on a “Books for dudes” video that featured Lonesome Dove.
Maybe this would have happened anyway given that you can’t change time, but in mid-to-late 2025, Simon & Schuster released a 40th-anniversary paperback edition with a Taylor Sheridan foreword, creating a direct bridge between Lonesome Dove and the modern Yellowstone audience. On September 23rd, it released an entirely new 35h 49m audiobook narrated by Will Patton.
In October, S&S said that the book had sold more copies in 2025 - 56,000 - than in any year since the TV miniseries, Return to Lonesome Dove, aired in 1993-94, the year that the Knicks were last in the Finals and OJ Simpson raced the police in his Ford Bronco. All while reading was reportedly getting scalped by the internet!
That brings us to 2026.
Early this year, Robert Duvall, the actor who played the protagonist Gus McCrae on the show, passed away at 95. He had said Gus had been his favorite role, and that Lonesome Dove was “The Godfather of Westerns,” and obituaries foregrounded it. RFD-TV re-aired the entire four-part miniseries in his honor. There was a big spike on Google Trends around this time.
In March, Sonny Bunch wrote Why Lonesome Dove Continues to Resonate on The Bulwark as part of the press tour for another McMurtry biography, Western Star: The Life of a Legend by David Streitfeld. When I tweeted about Lonesome Dove on Monday as I started writing this, my friend Cristin Culver replied recommending the book.
In May, The Art of Manliness kicked off another read-along, with weekly posts and discussion prompts on the book.
Finally, in August, Rachel Monroe and LD-stan Jia Tolentino wrote a whole New Yorker piece titled What To Read After “Lonesome Dove”.
In Texas, where I live, someone always seems to be reading “Lonesome Dove,” Larry McMurtry’s thrilling, ambivalent Western, first published in 1985. The rest of the country is catching on: the novel sold more copies in 2025 than it had in thirty years, and earlier this year it spiked on Google Trends. And I’m not surprised—“Lonesome Dove” is the kind of romantic, immersive story that gets BookTok going, but McMurtry shades his epic with just the right amount of regret. There’s never a bad time to hunker down with Gus, Call, and the other members of the Hat Creek outfit as they drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana, but summer is ideal. Nearly the whole novel takes place outdoors, through a series of vast landscapes that are at once brutal and beautiful. I guarantee you’ll cry at the end.
What is interesting to me is that, again, I didn’t see any of this! There was this whole Lonesome Dove movement happening right under my nose, on BookTok, in The New Yorker, on Instagram, on TV, across Substack, in read-along communities, and I missed it all.
But Claude didn’t.
The internet fragmented the media landscape into a billion pieces, like cable TV smashed it into hundreds before it. So much so that despite all of the time I spend on my computer and phone, despite how much I love to read, and despite the fact that I ripped through Yellowstone and Landman and Dutton Ranch and was hungry for more in the category, I didn’t catch a whiff of it.
Then I asked Claude for a book rec, and it told me to read Lonesome Dove. Which is maybe a coincidence! Maybe it just knows me well and thought I’d like it.
But I asked ChatGPT, too, on two separate occasions, and all three times, it recommended… Lonesome Dove. The second time was influenced by the first, but it re-recommended it when I asked for books to read in France. It was the only non-France-themed book on the list.
Two LLMs both recommended the same 850+ page book, a book that starts out pretty slow, when I asked for page-turners. I asked friends who read the book how they came to it, and many of them said Claude or ChatGPT recommended it to them, too. D.A. Wallach pointed out that LLMs keep recommending the book to his book club, which is a patient zero-to-superspreader scenario.
Claude loves Lonesome Dove so much that one guy, jj.books.and.beats, made an Instagram video in which Claude keeps pushing him to read it while he’s trying to work.
There’s a way to read this that’s something like “Ugh the flattening of culture!” Remakes are bad enough, now we’re so out of new ideas that the LLMs are just pushing us to the originals.
That’s not how I read it.
Two of the bigger challenges seem to me to be that 1) people are reading less and 2) things are so fragmented that we’re never all watching the same thing. There’s no TGIF or new Harry Potter book release at midnight.
If the internet fragmented discovery, LLMs might be the right tool to put the pieces back together. I don’t read Jia Tolentino or watch Colbert, but they do. They read and watch everything.
It’s been very fun to be reading something old and great at the same time as so many people on the internet seem to be, and finding those people and wondering how the hell they’re just coming to Lonesome Dove now, too.
The fact that it seems to be a bunch of traditional triggers that might have otherwise fizzled but have been given staying power and reach by LLMs - pretty much the one thing that we’re all using - is pretty cool. LLMs may be a new distribution channel for the back catalog of human culture.
Search is good at finding what you’re looking for when you know what you’re looking for. Social media is good at showing you what people are talking about right this second. LLMs are good at figuring out what you, specifically, might think is great, which is often what many other people think is great. Both search and social media have historically advantaged newness, and it’s interesting to think about what happens when LLMs advantage “best” or “best for me” or “lindyness.”
Our new distribution technology might turn out to be real good for old things.
I guess that’s life on the frontier.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with another Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
Maybe the interesting question isn’t why everyone is reading Lonesome Dove, but why a slow, deeply human 800-page story feels so appealing right now. We live in a world optimised for speed, summaries and endless new information. Yet some things only reveal their value when we stay with them long enough.
well...damn...time to reread Lonesome Dove, I guess! The miniseries is outstanding, too - Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover? All perfectly cast.
When you get done exploring Lonesome Dove/Streets of Laredo - another absolute page turner is Shogun by James Clavell.
Although a lot of people picked that up to read after the recent miniseries also.