Everyone is Reading Lonesome Dove

Packy McCormick noticed that everyone in his network seemed to be reading Lonesome Dove at the same time — and traced it back to Claude recommending the book when asked for a page-turner. He documents the book’s multi-year rediscovery arc (McMurtry’s death, Stephen King’s Colbert rec, BookTok, the Taylor Sheridan universe, the S&S 40th anniversary edition) and argues the internet fragmented discovery so completely that even a reader immersed in all the right channels missed the whole wave. His conclusion: LLMs may be the first distribution technology that advantages “best” or “lindyness” over recency, putting the pieces of culture back together.

Connections

• Packy McCormick — author; Not Boring newsletter
• Lonesome Dove — the book at the center of the essay
• Reading — the broader cultural anxiety about whether anyone reads anymore
• Media Consumption — fragmentation of discovery in the streaming and social media era
• AI — Claude and ChatGPT both recommending the same book as a cultural phenomenon
• Cultural Stagnation — counterpoint: maybe LLMs can surface lindy classics rather than just accelerate decay
• Monoculture — the essay is about defragmentation; the return to a shared reading experience