I was turned onto this book at my local bookstore by the store manager who said it had hints of magical realism and was also their bestseller. My interest was piqued. Plus, the author had spent time in Austin at the Michener Center, which I thought was pretty cool. All the short stories had some relation to Japan, whether they were set in Japan or have Japanese characters or characters obsessed with Japanese culture. There were only 10 stories in this small book and I'd break them down into three lengths: micro, shorter, and longer stories. The shortest story was 3 pages; the longest was 26 pages.

Both micro stories were unsatisfying, too short to unfold in any meaningful way besides being impressionistic. Like a skilled painter using a one-inch wide paintbrush on a 2 by 2-inch square canvas, the skilled stroke of each micro story didn't paint much of a scene or story. The writer in me thought, 'Kind of interesting.' The reader in me thought, 'Wish there was more.'

I've had a trepidation to reading any novels from the Western genre, mainly because of the clichés and the typical tropes that come with them from literature, movies, television, comic books, and more. But my wife purchased a used copy of this novel and told me she had always wanted to read Lonesome Dove. I had a curiosity about Larry McMurtry as well and decided to overlook any preconceptions about this adventure set in the Old West. And, boy, am I glad I did.

I'm not going to go into too much summation because there are too many storylines and too many characters. But I will say this: two former Texas Rangers, Woodrow McCall and "Gus" McCrae, are inspired to gather a herd of cattle and drive them north to begin the first cattle ranch north of the Yellowstone River because of an old friend's description of a beautiful and "uninhabited" Montana (by white folks, of course). The first thing I noticed, almost immediately and enjoyed for the entirety of the novel, was just how funny it was, the way the characters razzed each other, some of the situations they got themselves in. I found myself laughing out loud quite often and enjoyed the banter between the men in the Hat Creek outfit. Gus was the instigator of a lot of this banter, mainly because he just loved to talk, something that loveably irritated most of the outfit; they hated it when Gus was around but missed it when Gus was gone.