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.
Longtime reader, first time commenter - I just finished Lonesome Dove on a flight yesterday and couldn't believe this! I missed all of the social media / media moments you mentioned, but came to the book because of another currently popular novel The Correspondent, where LD gets a great shout-out. I suspect that may be why some of your friends' moms are reading it too. This defragmentation phenomenon is a super interesting idea!
It's been on my list for a long time - can I recommend Cold Mountain in the meantime though? I'd never seen the film and bought the book while on holiday in Asheville NC. It's a wonderful book and also very addictive.
I am so old I remember when that book came out when I was about 12 and I was only marginally interested in it then. Unfortunately I have to finish Michael McFaul's "Autocrats vs. Democrats" which is going so slow that I have Substack comments about it from months ago* and I then have 2 books which I fundamentally promised to read. This post is however a comment on how "The Everlasting" could possibly win a Hugo because I am sure there are people in the voting pool who had forgotten that books could make you feel like that.
*It was great that the book tour was a big success and there will be more book tour.
(I thought that Robert Jackson Bennett had this award in the bag but then saw a post that did not like a) that Ana was created by the Empire and that this somehow means we are supposed to be suspicious of her b) that Bennett is on the Empire's side as opposed to the two-bit feudal monarchy where the action is set. So if you fundamentally don't like empires you will not vote for this and that's what happened. It had the fewest first-place votes.)
And Bennett goofed on whether one character was supposed to be able to speak Imperial standard or not which I considered a minor flaw but about which Hugo voters are entitled to be savage.
Also by the way the TV mini-series is very good and very true to the book. Still better to read the book. There's more in there. But the show is still very good as well.
My hot take is that it seems like Gus is the main character but really it's Call. It was always Call.
The detail that sells the thesis is the book club getting the same rec from multiple LLMs unprompted - that's not distribution, that's a congregation forming without a church. The line to sit with is LLMs advantaging lindyness over newness: every previous distribution technology taxed old things and subsidized new ones, and if that subsidy just flipped, the knock-on effects for backlists, and for what a "hit" even is, are enormous. One counterweight worth watching: the models all read the same internet, so the canon they reassemble could get narrow fast. We're all about to be reading whatever was best-reviewed in the corpus, forever. Which, fine. It beats whatever the algorithm was doing to us.
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.
I bought Shogun but haven’t read yet! Will have to get through the Lonesome Dove series first (over the next decade)
Longtime reader, first time commenter - I just finished Lonesome Dove on a flight yesterday and couldn't believe this! I missed all of the social media / media moments you mentioned, but came to the book because of another currently popular novel The Correspondent, where LD gets a great shout-out. I suspect that may be why some of your friends' moms are reading it too. This defragmentation phenomenon is a super interesting idea!
Streets of Laredo is even better
Naw. It's good tho. But Lonesome Dove has the whole gang in it and you can't beat that whole chemistry.
It is a cool story tho. Very dark. Weird title since they spend about 10 minutes in Laredo but no one asked me.
I've read it three times since it first came out. I would also recommend the miniseries, as it follows the book closely.
ok, ok, I’m reading it!
It's been on my list for a long time - can I recommend Cold Mountain in the meantime though? I'd never seen the film and bought the book while on holiday in Asheville NC. It's a wonderful book and also very addictive.
I’ll check it out! Love Asheville
I appreciate the level of research here.
I am so old I remember when that book came out when I was about 12 and I was only marginally interested in it then. Unfortunately I have to finish Michael McFaul's "Autocrats vs. Democrats" which is going so slow that I have Substack comments about it from months ago* and I then have 2 books which I fundamentally promised to read. This post is however a comment on how "The Everlasting" could possibly win a Hugo because I am sure there are people in the voting pool who had forgotten that books could make you feel like that.
*It was great that the book tour was a big success and there will be more book tour.
(I thought that Robert Jackson Bennett had this award in the bag but then saw a post that did not like a) that Ana was created by the Empire and that this somehow means we are supposed to be suspicious of her b) that Bennett is on the Empire's side as opposed to the two-bit feudal monarchy where the action is set. So if you fundamentally don't like empires you will not vote for this and that's what happened. It had the fewest first-place votes.)
And Bennett goofed on whether one character was supposed to be able to speak Imperial standard or not which I considered a minor flaw but about which Hugo voters are entitled to be savage.
The funny thing about Lonesome Dove is he wrote it to try to demystify cowboys. Didn't work.
Also by the way the TV mini-series is very good and very true to the book. Still better to read the book. There's more in there. But the show is still very good as well.
My hot take is that it seems like Gus is the main character but really it's Call. It was always Call.
The detail that sells the thesis is the book club getting the same rec from multiple LLMs unprompted - that's not distribution, that's a congregation forming without a church. The line to sit with is LLMs advantaging lindyness over newness: every previous distribution technology taxed old things and subsidized new ones, and if that subsidy just flipped, the knock-on effects for backlists, and for what a "hit" even is, are enormous. One counterweight worth watching: the models all read the same internet, so the canon they reassemble could get narrow fast. We're all about to be reading whatever was best-reviewed in the corpus, forever. Which, fine. It beats whatever the algorithm was doing to us.