Finished: 'The Last Kind Words Saloon'

I picked up Larry McMurty's TLKWS off the bargain rack at the Wall Drug Book Store on my most recent trip to Wall. He's best known for Lonesome Dove, which I've never read (because it's never been on the bargain rack).

This was a good quick read I enjoyed a lot, though I'm not really sure what the plot was except to follow Wyatt Erp and Doc Holliday around while they wise-cracked and got drunk. Hey, doesn't take much to entertain me some days.

From Goodreads:

 In this "comically subversive work of fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Larry McMurtry chronicles the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Tracing their legendary friendship from the settlement of Long Grass, Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, The Last Kind Words Saloon finds Wyatt and Doc living out the last days of a cowboy lifestyle that is already passing into history. In his stark and peerless prose McMurtry writes of the myths and men that live on even as the storied West that forged them disappears. Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.  

Among the better lines:

"Nine out of ten statements Doc made were nonsense, but it was dangerous to stop listening because the tenth statement might be really smart." Could've been describing me.

"Hold on, I'll just go borrow that shotgun from Wells Fargo," Doc said. "Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it."

I gave it a 7- on the Haugenometer.

***

Before this I read Janet Evanovich's Explosive Eighteen, but it doesn't deserve it's own post. I really liked her first seven books of the series, but then tired of them, but kept picking them up and reading them in hopes of recapturing that. But it hasn't happened and I don't know why I didn't quit sooner, but should have. This is my last one. Promise.

They're all just the same. Her main character, Stephanie Plum, hasn't changed in the entire series. The characters haven't changed. No growth, no difference. No more.

I gave it a 5.