64 Books Like Montana Diary

I love the way Lisa Hanawalt draws nearly anything, but I especially love the way that Lisa draws animals, the desert, and the West. If you’re a Bojack Horseman fan, you’ve already fallen in love with her innovative cartooning style (she was a Bojack producer and its production designer). Her work here is all absurd movement, perfect timing, hilarious expressions, and, oh, yeah, a main character that’s a horseback-riding half-coyote, half-dog, full of messy humanity—a visceral, subversive Western, as delicious and satisfying as sleeping under a starry sky. 

The iyashikei (literally ‘healing’) genre of manga and anime concerns itself mainly with deeply character-driven narratives where nothing much happens. Except, of course, the simple living of life is beautiful, often the sweet spot where everything happens, and the creators behind this work know it.

This book is a pinnacle of that genre, a gorgeously illustrated meditation on the beauty of camping, campfire cooking, and the landscapes of Japan, as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful, funny group of high school girls. 

This book is Eleanor Davis’s gorgeous travel documentary of her 2016 cross-country bike tour. Her lines are so vivid and alive, and her day-by-day recounting of the details of her body, her bike, and the country changing around her is both simple and intricate. All of her work is amazing, but this one is definitely a standout. 

Luke Healey’s highly graphic, wonderfully expressive cartooning style is especially powerful in this memoir of his time hiking the Pacific Coast Trail. Through-hiking the PCH is an obvious physical feat in any circumstance, but it’s a deeply taxing mental one, and Luke’s reflection on his trip compels you forward.

You are next to him on the trail, begging the question repeatedly: how can we bear moving forward? How can we do this, day after day? You feel right there as Luke laces up his boots, takes a breath, and walks on. 

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.

Winter Wheat, published in 1944, tells the story of Ellen Webb, a young woman coming of age on a farm in Montana. Walker moved from back east to Great Falls, Montana in 1933, and she is one of many writers who adopted Montana as their home state and wrote very eloquently about the unique challenges of growing up in such isolation, living a life so focused on hard work and basic survival. Walker published several excellent novels, but Winter Wheat was her tour de force. 

I grew up in a small Montana town, so Watson’s novel has a special meaning for me. It is a vivid portrayal of small-town life on the Great Plains and takes place during the same time period as my own book. It tells of the corruption of a trusted official and its effect on his family, his victims, and the town itself. Watson’s novel allowed me to feel and understand the deep emotions, the pain, the anxiety, the love, and the disappointment that his characters were feeling.

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.

What was it like to work as a forester with the US Forest Service was young? This is a memoir by Elers Koch who worked as a federal forester from 1903 to 1943 in the Northern Rockies. Forty Years a Forester gives an inside account of how rangers built the national forest system in its earliest years, which is fascinating enough. But what makes Koch even more interesting is how he bucked conventional wisdom on quandaries like forest fires (with which he had ample firsthand experience and shared here) and wilderness long before views like his became common. Government bureaucrats rarely write good memoirs, but this one invites you in and provides real insight—and even some inspiration.

I picked up this book while doing my “trace of TR” trip out West with my brother in 2011. We rode through the Badlands on horseback and saw the site of Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch, even the bar in Wibaux, where he knocked out a bully with a one-two combination.

Aadland, a Montana rancher, and TR aficionado decided to follow the paths of Roosevelt’s ranching days and hunting expeditions on foot and horseback, the way Roosevelt did himself in the 1880s. TR often credited his time in the Badlands for making him into the man who became a president.

What is there about this land that has such an impact? Having ridden there myself, I can understand a little, but Aadland’s experience as a modern rancher lends a context that really helps us understand this vital period of Roosevelt’s life.