Hondo by Louis L’Amour vs. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry! What is the best western ever?
Whenever anybody asks me about what kind of books I like, I say, “Good books.”
That might sound like a cop-out, but it isn’t. Instead of being stuck on one genre, I’d rather rather read the best books of every genre. But where do you start with that? A few years ago, I started rating books by genre with Best Books Ever by Genre!!! Part 1, but I never started Best Books by Genre!!! Part 2.
No list of genres in America is complete without the western. A common complaint about westerns is that so many of them are so similar, but that complaint works for just about any genre. That’s why I don’t stick to one genre when I read, I guess: once you’ve read a few books in one genre, you’ve read them all. Still, I needed a criteria with which to judge westerns if I’m going to complete my best book by genre list. And so I started with actor John Wayne.
John Wayne says Hondo by Louis L’Amour is the best western that he has ever read. If anybody knows westerns, it’s John Wayne. He’s kind of biased, though. John Wayne starred in Hondo the movie, so John Wayne had better have liked the book. It’s possible that John Wayne lied about having read Hondo (people lie about the books they’ve read all the time), but in this case I’ll take his word for it.
Then there’s Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Lonesome Dove won (I mean, ‘was awarded’) the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986, so the book has to be pretty good in some way. Yeah, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners can be kind of questionable (that’s for another blog post), but at the very least, a novel that has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has some literary value.
The western is a tough genre for me to rate because I haven’t read many of them, so whose opinion should I value more when it comes to novels in the western genre, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or John Wayne’s?
Books that win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction tend to be pretty good. I’m not sure that books recommended by John Wayne are rated quite so highly. I’ve never seen John Wayne’s Reading List. Maybe he was a voracious reader, and I just don’t know it. Either way, I’m not going to argue with him about what a good western is. If he says Hondo is the best western he’s ever read, I’m going to believe that Hondo is at least pretty good.
*****
Two Dysfunctional Book Reviews for the price of one:
Lonesome Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winning version of a western. It’s long, almost a thousand pages, and I was bored a few times but not very often. Most of the characters, plots, and subplots are interesting. My only real complaint is that the author gets a little condescending with his characters (almost like he’s winking to reader about how dumb a few of them are), but that obviously didn’t bother the Pulitzer voters.
Hondo is a pretty good book. I finished it quickly. I didn’t get bored. The characters faced several interesting moral dilemmas, especially in the last third of the book. I’d recommend it as a quick read.
I’m not a fan of the western as a genre, but I liked these two books. As far as I’m concerned, both John Wayne and the Pulitzer Prize committee did okay with these choices. Still, if I had to choose, I’d go with Hondo. It’s a western’s western, as opposed to being a western written for readers who don’t like westerns. Plus, John Wayne liked it.
*****
Read more Literary Combat:
Ender’s Game vs. The Hunger Games vs. A Game of Thrones
Dr. Seuss vs. Stephen King! The Battle of the Self-Banned Books
A Time To Kill vs. To Kill A Mockingbird
*****
I’m pretty sure that neither John Wayne nor any Pulitzer Prize for Fiction voters have read my book.
A grammar-obsessed English teacher falls in ‘luuuvvv’ but discovers how chaotic and dangerous ‘luuuvvv’ can be.
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Dysfunctional Literacy 
I’m stuck on Blood Meridian. Love it. Hate it. Can enjoy one sentence at a time and feel like a killer in the wilderness.
Blood Meridian. I’ve heard good things about it, but that seems like a tough book to read.
Even so, if I’m in the right mood for that kind of a challenging book, I might try it some time.
Is anyone reading Shane anymore? Nice slim volume for the back pocket.
If John Wayne had starred in the movie Shane (or if John Wayne had said Shane was the best western he had ever read), then I would have named it.