My First Summer in the Sierra

 My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir is a chronicle of his time at a dream job--vaguely attached to a commercial sheep-herding outfit--in 1869. Muir is a celebrated conservationist and an underrated writer. His account is pure joy. It's inspiring and energizing and envy provoking. It's also a feat of word-smithery, to describe the same emotion in different ways, in daily journal entries, over four months. Only in September does he run out of new ways to describe the exultant beauty of the mountains. Along the way, his odes are interrupted by caprices of the wild: dramatic bear predation on the sheep herd, for example, and vertigo from the rim of Yosemite Falls that haunts him for several nights afterwards. Another time they run out of bread for more than two weeks and had to live on just mutton. These setbacks would break the spirit of most others, including his co-workers, but Muir redirects the narrative energy back to euphoria. Imagine the most positive Psalms, over and over, in an unbroken flood of gratitude and wonder.