"She asked me several times to read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, not quite to the point of persistence..."

"... not nagging or begging, but with a quiet unspoken pleading—she loved it, and she wanted to talk about it with someone she knew would love it too; I had read The Last Picture Show, and I knew I would like the writing enough to ride along with the plot (I understood it was not a Louis L’Amour type of Western), but I didn’t, and I’m not sure why; maybe it was just the resistance that even an adult child feels when a parent asks her to do something optional—I could feel her yearning, and maybe that scared or dismayed me in ways I still can’t name, or maybe I thought I had too many other 'important' things I wanted to read, this being the years I was in grad school and had developed a bookaholic habit of acquiring them faster than I could ever read them, a habit that is yet uncured, which is sometimes serendipitous, because on one of the four bookshelves in my bedroom, here is her swaybacked copy, which I still haven’t read, but which I’ve already possessed by writing my name in, and when I finally start reading the first page—such a simple, easy thing to do, no resistance at all—oh God, forgive me, I’m hooked by the first sentence and smitten by a half-sentence in the middle of the second paragraph, 'Pigs on the porch just made things hotter,' and by the second chapter I understand she probably wanted to talk about the affection the writer bore for these characters, and his attention to their interior lives, which is probably the same reason she begged me to read some Barbara Pym, and now that I’ve passed 50 myself, maybe by reading this book I can put away the security blanket of regrets and wallow no more in the same pond that made child-me ask for a song I knew would make me cry."

That's the longest sentence in "50 Things About My Mother," in which each of the 50 things is one sentence long. Many of the sentence are short. It's easy to write short sentences, a little harder to mix short and long sentences, and quite hard — not that it's often a good idea — to write an extremely long sentence like that. When you do write an extremely long sentence, you should have a good reason, and I'll bet you could write 50 reasons, in long and short sentences, why that long sentence is that long.

Anyway, tomorrow is Mother's Day. I hope you — unlike me and the author of that list, Laura Lynn Brown — have a mother who is still alive.