Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

We’re back! After a crazy week (plus), we’re currently all back from visiting family, and I’m up to my ears in laundry. While driving to Idaho and visiting my parents, however, I wanted audiobooks I was already familiar with, and as I was scrolling through the ‘available now’ list of titles, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be entertaining to revisit some of the Louis L’Amour novels that I read in junior high.* I ended up listening to both Utah Blaine and Kiowa Trail while I was in Idaho, so here are my thoughts!

First of all, L’Amour heroes definitely have a type. They’re broad of shoulder, lean of hip, rugged and honorable–you get the idea. Utah Blaine is a former soldier who saves a rancher from a lynching and undertakes to protect his land from a whole town of greedy men who want to get their hands on it. (Hence the lynching.) Conn from Kiowa Trail works for the woman he’s loved for years, and when her younger brother is shot in the back for daring to pay a call on a townsman’s daughter, he backs up her planned revenge on the town. In general, the bad guys get more or less what they deserve, the good guys get the girl, and there is a surprising lack of death by infection for the number of people getting shot. Utah Blaine has some fairly impressive insta-love, but like I said, westerns are formulaic. You know what you’re getting. There are definitely original elements within the formula, however, which is what makes L’Amour fun. Both books have flaws–Utah Blaine suffers from insufficient falling action and Kiowa Trail has a noticeable streak of racism unsurprising for the time and subject–but if you go in with your eyes open, both books still have entertainment value. Anybody else out there go through a western phase at some point in their life?

*Why was I reading westerns in Rhode Island when I was in junior high? Well, we had a downstairs cabinet holding shelves of them, which I found out recently from my sister used to be my dad’s ‘graduation’ books. (As in, he would buy one and read it during graduation at RIC, since college graduations when you’re only there as a professor and don’t know anyone actually graduating are deathly boring.) And when I was in junior high, I still had plenty of free time, so I read a whole lot of books that we owned simply because they were there. Plus, westerns are comfortingly predictable–the hero wins every time.