I've been hitting the McMurtry hard this summer. "Duane's Depressed" was pretty good and then I found out that there was another book in the series, "When The Light Goes", so I read that too. I liked it, it was a short read but it filled in some gaps that I could relate to. That mostly being the age range covered is where I'm at currently. I do think that I've tired a bit of his writing style though and I think part of that is the books in this series that came much later on after Last Picture Show were all written after McMurtry had spent a lot of years writing screenplays and they seem to me to have a screenplay feel to them. I say that but it didn't stop me from reading more of his work! I went on to read "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers" and enjoyed it a good bit, plenty of interesting characters, the locations appealed to me but then at the end it took a very movie-like twist and left me puzzled. It seemed like he needed an ending and just came up with something that would look good on screen. I started "The Last Kind Words Saloon", a tale of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, here in the last week but I'm not sure when I'll finish it soon. It's not really holding my interest, the dialogue again seems as though it was written as a movie script. Hard to explain but it doesn't flow like a typical novel, at least to me.
Someone suggested Stephen Harrigan upthread so I looked into his stuff last week. While I didn't find the history of Texas book in the library I did find a collection of essays, basically articles that he had once written for magazines, and it's pretty good. He does the reading himself which is nice I think. The stories are not all Texas-centric but most do have some relevance. The first essay is about the Comanche Indians and provides a summary of the last days of the Comanche as a free people with some discussion on Cynthia and Quanah Parker, their relocation to a reservation and how the Comanche now are coping with the modern world.