Book Girl: A Journey Through the Treasures & Transforming Power of a Reading Life by Sarah Clarkson.

Book Girl Discussion Question #6: In chapter 3, the author says ‘We understand our worlds through the words we are given.’ Can you think of a time when a passage from a book gave you empathy for or a deeper understanding of a person or situation in your life?

So many.

I recently read a couple of books by Western author Elmer Kelton, and although they are set back around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, they gave me an understanding of my own daddy and my grandfather that I didn’t have before, even though neither of them was a cowboy or anything like it. They were “good old boys” in their own way.

Hillbilly Elegy is another book that made me see my own family and upbringing and ancestry in a new way—I am a hillbilly from the flatlands of West Texas.

I also read The Borrowed House by Hilda van Stockum, bout a girl who is trained and educated as a Hitler Youth, and I was reminded of how difficult it is to transcend the limits of our childhood indoctrination and how we have to learn whom we can trust to tell the truth.

I understood the sharp pain of a prodigal son from my reading of Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, long before I experienced my own children growing older and making choices that I mourned and prayed over.

I understand a little of what it’s like to be a pastor in a small church from reading Jan Karon’s Mitford series and Bob DeGray’s We Never Stood Alone.

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson gave me some insight into what it feels like to be an African American man in twenty-first century America.

Several books I’ve read, including those of Torey Hayden and Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin and Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, gave me some empathy and understanding of what it’s like to be autistic or to live with an autistic person.

Even though I didn’t get the pet-loving gene, I understand that some people do love their dogs and cats dearly because I’ve read James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small and other books about the bond between a pet-owner and his or her pet.

No Graven Image by Elizabeth Elliott gave me insight into the life of a missionary and made me realize that the missionaries I know are real people not cardboard saints.

I could go on, but obviously I’m a more understanding and sympathetic person because of the many lives I’ve explored through reading both fiction and nonfiction. What have you read that made you understand something or someone in your life better?

The Good Old Boys by Elmer Kelton.
The Smiling Country by Elmer Kelton.

These books and others by San Angelo western writer Elmer Kelton embody the West Texas I knew growing up and the West Texas I heard about from my grandparents and others, far better than the hugely popular book, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I suppose comparisons are odious, but in this case I’ll make an exception. I thought the characters in Lonesome Dove were neither likable nor believable, but Hewey Calloway, although I certainly didn’t always agree with his decisions, was understandable and convincing and characteristic of the kind of men I saw and heard about in West Texas when I was growing up. Good old boys.

Hewey Calloway wants to stay a free and somewhat irresponsible cowboy. But life and changing times seem to be pushing him in another direction: settling down. Both of these books, The Good Old Boys and The Smiling Country, are about Hewey and his ongoing battle with himself and with the outside world to remain free and independent and also to make connections and conquer his own loneliness. Can he have love and family and also maintain his liberty and his allegiance to his own code of conduct?

At first, it seems that he cannot have both. Hewey must choose, and in The Good Old Boys, he does. Then, as happens to most of us, even the most independent and ornery, life and circumstances begin to narrow Hewey’s choices until it seems as if he can have neither the freewheeling life of a cowboy nor the comfort of home and family.In The Smiling Country, Hewey confronts his inability to stop time and change, and he realizes his own limitations and the isolation that his choices have imposed upon him. And yet, he also has made good choices that bring him friendship and support the he needs it the most.

Elmer Kelton was the farm-and-ranch editor for the San Angelo Standard-Times. Also, for five years he was editor of Sheep and Goat Raiser Magazine, and for another twenty-two years he was editor of Livestock Weekly. He wrote more than thirty western novels, set mostly in Texas, and he was awarded several Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. In 1977, Kelton received an Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement, and in 1998, he received the first Lone Star Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Larry McMurtry Center for Arts and Humanities at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.

I highly recommend Elmer Kelton’s western novels if you are at all interested in the genre, and even if you are not. There’s a smattering of language, and the cowboys are not all pure, (but they are much more honorable than McMurtry’s Gus and Call and Jake and whoever else figures in that rather dis-honorable novel). I would suggest that you read both books together to get the whole story of good old by, Hewey Calloway.

The Buckskin Line by Elmer Kelton.

The Day the Cowboys Quit by Elmer Kelton.

The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton.