My Sunday column

“No one claimed book collecting is rational.”
Those are the words of a man who knows a few things about books.
Larry McMurtry has certainly written a few. In fact he’s authored more than 40, including a few of my favorites.
Unlike the charmingly modest McMurtry, who refers to his best known work as “popular” but not “great,” I firmly believe “Lonesome Dove” transcends mere popularity. It is a truly great book. Certainly one could pile a tall stack of overrated “classics” that lack the fire and soul of McMurtry’s western epic. In fact ...
Ha.
A few paragraphs in and I already digress — thinking about books has that effect on me. One idea catapults me to another and my carefully aimed thoughts fly askew.
Let me start again.
Focus!
This column is about books. It’s also about “Books.”
Books are those quaint objects that some of us over 35 insist on buying and stacking on our bedside tables.
“Books” is the newest book by Larry McMurtry. It is about books.
You see, McMurtry is not only a superb and prolific author, he is a bookman. He buys and sells books and I don’t mean in any rich man’s hobby sort of way. He’s not Sir Geoffrey Snooppoodle raising freakish roses and naming them after the Royal Family.
He’s a serious bookman, wheeling and dealing from a mammoth store stocked with well over 200,000 titles in Archer City, Texas.
Best of all, McMurtry loves to read. He devours books like Jethro Bodine goes through a stack of Granny’s flapjacks.
As do I.
I am not sure what the first book I read was, but I do remember the thrill I felt as a first grader making my initial trip into the school library. It was heaven. Then, it wasn’t.
At Summerville Elementary the library was divided into separate sections for each grade — one through four. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the really good books were in the other sections. I didn’t give a tinker’s dang about Dick and Jane. And Spot could take a flying bark at the moon as far I was concerned.
I wanted to read about Davy Crockett, Jim Bridger and Daniel Boone and those stories and more like them were in the second-grade section. Or the third. Or the fourth.
One day, when I could take it no more, I slipped away from the first-grade aisles to sample the forbidden fruit. Busted! An ill-tempered librarian caught me, chewed on me a little and ordered me back to the hell that was Dick and Jane’s domain.
Fortunately an angel appeared. It materialized in the shape of a lady teacher who must have had the good sense to realize that my wanting to read a more difficult book wasn’t a bad thing at all.
She spoke to the librarian and after that, for the next three years, I was allowed to roam the library at will and check out whatever I wanted.
That’s why at the delicate age of 8, while most of my contemporaries were being bored to tears by those morons Dick and Jane, I was trapping beaver in the Wild West with Kit Carson, shivering with Gen. Washington at Valley Forge and getting into cozy adventures with Henry Aldrich.
A few short years later came books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard and the wonderful Ray Bradbury. I was hooked.
Since then there have been hundreds of other books and writers.
A billion words.
Today I live in a house jammed with thousands of books. Bradbury and Howard are still well represented. They are joined by Papa Hemingway and Rick Bragg. Pat Conroy and Tom Wolfe. William Faulkner is neighbors with Steinbeck and they both look down (from their higher shelf) on Stephen King and a blue million science fiction authors. Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler explore the shadows where Poe and H.P. Lovecraft go bump in the night.
In fact, they are all bumping around and making a racket tonight.
McMurtry’s “Books” has stirred them.
And me.

Jimmy Espy is executive editor of The Daily Citizen. You may see him on his lunch break this week. He’s the one reading a history of the “Winter War” between Russia and Finland. Leave him alone.