The Texan Reading List

Fiction· 1985

Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry

The novel that defines what Texas thinks of itself — and then quietly destroys that myth from the inside out.

McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls and set this Pulitzer-winning epic on the Texas frontier.

Fiction· 2017

Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

A Black Texas Ranger driving through East Texas in a pickup truck is doing more than solving murders — Locke uses the crime genre to say things about race and the state that straight literary fiction flinches from.

Locke is a Houston native and sets this crime novel in the Deep East Texas piney woods.

Fiction· 2013

The Son

by Philipp Meyer

Meyer spent years researching Comanche life and Texas land dynasties so he could write a state's entire brutal biography in one family — and it shows on every page.

Set across 150 years of Texas history, from Comanche captivity to the oil boom.

History· 2010

Empire of the Summer Moon

Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S. C. Gwynne

The history of Texas that the state's monuments leave out, written with the narrative velocity of a novel and the moral seriousness the subject demands.

Gwynne lives in Austin; the book chronicles the Comanche empire across the Texas plains.

Nonfiction· 1990

Friday Night Lights

A Town, a Team, and a Dream

by H. G. Bissinger

The book that made the rest of America understand why Texas treats high school football like a civic religion — and the one that made Odessa furious enough to prove his point.

Set in Odessa, Texas, following the Permian High Panthers through a single football season.

Fiction· 1985

Blood Meridian

Or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

The most violent and most beautiful novel ever set on Texas soil — read it because nothing else will make the border landscape feel so ancient and so merciless.

Set largely along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s, following the Glanton Gang's historical rampage.

Cookbook· 2004

Tex-Mex Cookbook

Traditions, Innovations, and Comfort Foods from Both Sides of the Rio Grande

by Robb Walsh

Not a trendy restaurant tie-in but a genuine act of culinary anthropology — Walsh traces every dish back to its border roots and dares you to argue with him.

Walsh is a Houston-based food writer who spent years documenting the Tex-Mex tradition across the state.

Cookbook· 2015

Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto

by Aaron Franklin and Jordan Mackay

Less a recipe book than a philosophy of fire and patience, written by the man who made people line up at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Franklin runs the most celebrated barbecue joint in Austin — and arguably in Texas.

Nonfiction· 1960

Goodbye to a River

by John Graves

The Texas book that Texans who read keep to themselves like a secret — a canoe trip down the Brazos that becomes a meditation on loss, memory, and what a place owes its people.

Graves, a native Texan, paddled the Brazos River in 1957 before dams changed it forever.