We Pointed Them North, By: E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott and Helena Smith

We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher

By: E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott and Helena Smith
University of Oklahoma Press; 15th printing edition (November 15, 1976)
272 pages

Teddy Blue was one of the last. One of the last great cowboys from the open range. I mean he was a living, breathing, man that lived the pages of the famed novel Lonesome Dove. In this book, he shares story after story about his life. About how it actually was on the great cattle drives – as apposed to “how it was told in the movies.” For anyone interested in the west, this book should not be missed.

Two of my favorite quotes:

In fact there was only two things the old-time cowpuncher was afraid of, a decent woman and being set afoot.

I did get to be a cowboy, though, and as Charlie Russell used to say, we were just white Indians anyway.

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When I Was a Child I Read Books
By: Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (March 13, 2012)
224 pages

I am not sure what to say about this book. It is written by a well-published writer and is titled: When I Was a Child I Read Books. So, I don’t know. I thought it was going to be a book about books. Maybe something similar to Larry McMurtry’s incredibly interesting work titled: Books: A Memoir. Instead, this book meanders, with little distinct conclusion, between religion, politics, education, and economics. Or, maybe I should have read the back cover and inside flap more carefully.

Two of my favorite quotes:

I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting.

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