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What Is The Best Reading Order For Lonesome Dove Books In Order?

2026-07-23 02:28:12

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4 Answers

Hannah

Read Lonesome Dove first, then read Streets of Laredo. The prequels are later optional reading for more background information on the characters. But reading them in chronological order would ruin the big surprises in Lonesome Dove and dilute the impact of the rest of the book and the emotional payoff of the ending. It is a simple book and overcomplicating it ruins it.

2026-07-26

Rachel

Reading the book in pure chronological order (starting with “Dead Man’s Walk”) ruins the whole experience for me. The book Lonesome Dove stands alone so perfectly as a self-contained story of a group of men with very mysterious pasts. The prequels, by definition, have to make Gus and Call children on a brash young man’s adventure, not the legends that they grow up to be. It would be like reading a biography on a famous person and then watching a documentary on how they became a legend before the biography.

Reading the books in the order that they were published is my stronghold on how to read these books. Read Lonesome Dove first. Then if you need more, read Streets of Laredo. The prequels, Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon, were written later as sorts of add-ons for die-hard fans. They are good but they explain a lot of things that were better left unexplained in the first book. So read the best first and then decide how far you want to go down the mountain.

2026-07-26

Quincy

It kind of depends on how you read. If you’re someone who enjoys deeply interconnected lore and you can’t stand reading a book where there are characters and storylines that were mentioned before but you have to wait to find out more about them, then read them in chronological order: ‘Dead Man’s Walk’, ‘Comanche Moon’, ‘Lonesome Dove’, ‘Streets of Laredo’. But that’s a long, slow, dense book and a lot of people wouldn’t want to read that much of a similar style before reaching the masterpiece.

If you’re not one of the deep, connected lore fans, the publication order is probably safer. You get the masterpiece first, and then, if you find that you want more of that world, the prequels can be read as an interesting look back at the characters in their wild youth. In fact, reading the older, weary versions first, and then learning about their youth to come, is a poignant read that is missing from reading the books in chronological order first.

2026-07-28

Xander

Read Lonesome Dove first, then Streets of Laredo. The prequels were published more than a decade later, and read like rather extensive backstory. They were fine, but not as wonderful as the novels that inspired them. I tried reading the novels in chronological order once, and Lonesome Dove read like the middle chapter of a long, long novel instead of the towering masterpiece that it is. Read them in publication order, just as McMurtry wrote them.

2026-07-29

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