Maybe it's because he first opened his indie bookstore (Booked Up, very cute) in DC and because of his pithy remark about the people who live in DC and what they choose to read, but I just had to pass along this review of BOOKS: A MEMOIR by Larry McMurtry (yeah, the LONESOME DOVE guy).
On books in DC, McMurtry said, "Washington is a civil service town in which the stars are not the politicians or the bureaucrats: the stars in D.C. are the journalists . . . A world in which journalists are stars is not my world. What depressed me most in D.C. was that the various great houses I was invited to contained so few books."
So how come I used to see so many people reading books when I rode the Metro? Maybe the great unwashed masses who don't live in those "great houses" are better-read than the people they work for, because I saw no small number of commuters clutching books as they made their way to their offices. And not just junk. Sometimes, when I was reading a particularly controversial, classic or unusual book, I'd even get a comment from one of my fellow passengers on how he or she had read it and loved it.
I can appreciate McMurtry's views on DC's civil service-orientation and tendency to glamorize the media, but to say that we don't love our books . . . well, obviously, the guy has never been to my house.
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