JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove now, again (see yesterday’s post on this, here), experiencing that brittle silence spacing the dialog of long, open, open places. That’s probably because the area where we start out in the novel is fairly flat land filled with tough scrub, and not many people. The land wasn’t necessarily quiet–anyone hiking in bog country or high desert knows that there is plenty of life going on around you, and its just that the sound that gets made in its living doesn’t have much to bounce on, and so the sky swallows most of it. But the sound is definitely there–but in general in the country around Lonesome Dove there weren’t many people, either.