This week on Booking Through Thursday:

The reverse of last week’s question:

Imagine that everything is going just swimmingly. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and all’s right with the world. You’re practically bouncing from health and have money in your pocket. The kids are playing and laughing, the puppy is chewing in the cutest possible manner on an officially-sanctioned chew toy, and in between moments of laughter for pure joy, you pick up a book to read . . .

What is it?

In my answer to last week’s question, I suggested that How To Be Good by Nick Hornby would be the book to turn to for consolation. I hadn’t read it for a while so have been doing so this past week and I think I have to say it might be my choice for this week’s question as well. It’s so funny! And a far better book than I remember it being when I first read it a few years ago. I think it would make a good film, and I’m imagining that as I read along, starring Emma Thompson as Katie, Hugh Grant as David, and Colin Firth as Stephen. But wait! Stephen gets cut out of the action early on. Maybe the director could call for a lot of flashbacks so that Colin gets more screen time…

Actually, when looking over my shelves again, my answer to this week’s question would likely be two books by Ivan Doig, the first two in a trilogy about the McCaskill family (I never really cared as much for the third). English Creek and Dancing At the Rascal Fair are wonderful reads about the early days of Montana statehood, lovingly written by Doig (most of whose other books are among my favourites), all beautifully written, I might add. Doig, like Wallace Stegner, is one of those unsung masters of the written word who received little attention during their careers because they were always wrongly ghetto-ized as being merely “western” writers, of interest only to people living in Western North America. Wrong!! Their writing dances circles around most of the long-established and highly praised “eastern” writers.

There is a point in Dancing, referring back to English Creek, that always makes me gasp and cry with its surprise, even though I know what it is and anticipate it coming into the story. And, hands down, Doig wrote the very best description, ever, of seeing the Rockies for the very first time…

There in the gap, Herbert whoaed the horses.

What had halted him, and us, was a change of earth as abrupt as waking into the snow had been.

Ahead was where the planet greatened.

To the west now, the entire horizon was a sky-marching procession of mountains, suddenly much nearer and clearer than they were before we entered our morning’s maze of tilted hills. Peaks, cliffs, canyons, cite anything high or mighty and there it was up on that rough west brink of the world. Mountains with snow summits, mountains with jagged-gray faces. Mountains that were free-standing and separate as blades from the hundred crags around them; mountains that went among other mountains as flat palisades of stone miles long, like guardian reefs amid wild waves. The Rocky Mountains, simply and rightly named. Their double magnitude here startled and stunned a person, at least this one – how deep into the sky their motionless tumult reached, how far these Rockies columned across the earth.
– Ivan Doig from Dancing At the Rascal Fair