60 books like These Thousand Hills

I knew just about from the first page that ‘The Buckskin,’ as they call it, is a place I’d like to go. Just reminiscing about family vacations there had me wanting more. In book one, with Lucy, we get to see the ranch from her artist’s perspective and I could picture her sitting in the corner of the stall sketching the horses and I wanted to join her. The property is so well drawn out for the reader that it is easy to wander down the snow-line paths between the cabins and the dining hall, and sneak around to the bunkhouse for a bonfire. Even in the dead of winter, the atmosphere is so warm and inviting I’ve already signed up for another visit. Thank goodness there are ten books in this series!

This book broke me! Eli, a big, silent cowboy, and Abigail, a determined ranch owner come together in this book in explosive ways. The steam knocked my socks off, and I could picture the dusty ranch and barn set in Deep River, Montana so easily from the author’s descriptions. The love story is intense, filled with angst and a little bit of kink. Breaking Him is a book I will remember for a long time to come.

MacFarland Ranch has something for everyone. It’s a working cattle ranch, a breeding farm, and offers guest cabins in scenic Paradise Valley, Montana. At the lodge there are high-end cabins, though Wade’s fixer-upper would do me just fine, and plenty of options to keep guests busy all vacation. I wanted to work the cattle, wait for foals, and just sit on my porch and take in the beautiful vistas on a relaxing evening. You can really feel the love in the family-run business as each sibling has their part to do and Wade and his guest lodge is the perfect introduction to the ranch, taking the reader from guest to one of the family. I’ve got book two already and will be waiting for book 3 to arrive later this year.

In a tale of Scottish immigrants who homestead Montana ranches in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, Dancing at the Rascal Fair features a cast of characters who cooperate and sometimes clash as they build lives in a harsh new country. Human relationships prove as challenging as the land, the livestock, and the weather. Doig, like few authors who write about the West, presents a faithful picture of ranch life.   

This is the cleverest, funniest, best Sherlock Holmes homage ever. It’s Montana, 1893, and I’m watching the red-headed Amlingmeyer brothers, down-on-their-luck ranch hands, entertain themselves reading Holmes stories in Harper’s Weekly.

Big Red, the younger brother, is reading to his older brother, Old Red (all of 27). Old Red might be illiterate, but I’ll match his “detectifyin’” skills with Holmes’ any day. I love Big Red’s reluctant but loyal acceptance of his role as Watson as the two cowpokes deal with stampedes, mysterious deaths, and cowboys named Puddin-foot and Swivel-eye.

No matter what Big Red tells him, Old Red doesn’t quite believe the Holmes stories are fiction. But I believe Hockensmith’s stories are exactly what Mark Twain would have written if he’d come up with this brilliant idea.

With the unusual title, this book was recommended to me by a bubbly store book clerk. Afraid to tell her no, thank you. I paid for the book and fled the store. I was hooked from the first line of the book to the last. As LJ takes the stage full of suspicion, Andra is on edge yet stoic. They seem an unlikely pairing. The unfolding of the story is like a long-awaited date night. Hopeful, warm, with the promise of more. This story is a reminder that odds can be overcome if you are strong enough to stand alone when others want you to sit down. 

The first time I finished reading this book, I felt ambushed. The description is breathtaking and the dialogue is hilarious.

So much of the book is surreal: The main character hunts for a runaway girlfriend who’s absconded with his electric razor (which is useless; it has no cord). A woman at a bar blows smoke rings without a cigarette. A guy known only as “airplane man” winds up nabbed, with a large plush bear, by the FBI—and the main character’s major epiphany is sparked by a horse fart. Then, suddenly, near the end, I cried so hard the words blurred. And the final scene is perfection.

Funny, heartbreaking, absurd, and poignant at once.

McGuane sure kicked it off for me in terms of seeing a way to write new fiction. Story is not a priority in his world rather observation of characters battling the odds of surviving each day. The reader wants to be like some of the characters and run to the hills from others but the sense of humor, dirt under the fingernails of these singular people we’ll never meet, relationships we’ll never be in, and locations such as Livingston, Montana or Key West, Florida we won’t spend much time in, draws me to McGuane’s page. McGuane, who wrote scripts for Missouri Breaks and Rancho Deluxe, writes like a filmmaker – the smells, the weather, the alcohol, the drugs – the reader is in the scene, the sun on your neck, the dust in the air, the sound of the ice-cold creek. McGuane is a travel agent.

I’ve always felt a desire to make the world make sense through data – that numbers and structure could help unlock hidden meanings. When I read this novel, I felt seen: it’s told from the perspective of T. S. Spivet – a 12-year-old boy who has the same urge. Spivet thoroughly documents the world around him, sketching an ant he sees in the grass, and drawing schematics and maps of the spaces he travels through on his quest to travel to the Smithsonian Institution. The book’s margin is lavishly illustrated with Spivet’s diagrams – in seeing the world through his eyes, it felt like how I see it through my own.

I read the novel when I saw that Jane Campion had chosen to adapt the book for her latest film. I have nerves of cast iron. But I found this book truly terrifying. The subject is human evil – the sadistic, twisted cruelty of which men are capable, both to animals, and other human beings. The descriptive writing is extraordinary: the ranch, the mountains, and the wild lands of Montana appear before your eyes. The family is almost destroyed by the predatory, violent brother Phil. He is like a Shakespearean villain: magnetic, charismatic, spellbinding, brilliant, and vicious.

Campion softens the edges of the story at every step in her wonderful film. And I can understand why. Had she filmed the book the movie would be banned. Read the book.