I've never made it up to Canada proper. Been close a couple times, close enough to smell it, but the farthest north my truck and I have ever gotten was a fishing trip on the Minnesota side of the border lakes. So when I saw that Paul Theroux, a travel writer I've been reading since my dad's paperback of The Old Patagonian Express sat on the porch shelf for twenty years, went and wrote a whole book about Canada, I paid attention.

The book is True North, and The Globe and Mail has a piece on it. The wrinkle here is that Theroux is an American telling Canada's story, which is a bit like a neighbor writing your family history. Sometimes the outsider sees things you've quit noticing. Sometimes he gets it wrong. Most days the truth lands somewhere in between, and the book is where you'd find out which.

The Globe and Mail piece says Theroux conveys the beauty and heart of Canada through this book, and that's the part that hooked me. Canada deserves the slow treatment. Second-largest country on earth by area, and most of it is empty in the best way. The kind of empty where the road goes on for a hundred miles and you might see three other vehicles and a moose. That's country I understand. The Ozarks aren't the Yukon by any stretch, but I know what it means to live where the towns are far apart and the land does most of the talking.

Theroux's method over the years, at least in the books of his I've read, has been to move through a place rather than over it. He doesn't write from the hotel bar. He talks to people, ordinary people, and waits them out until they tell him something true. I don't know exactly how he traveled for this one, train or highway or a mix of both, and I won't pretend to. But if he worked the way he usually works, he earned what's on those pages.

What I like about a book like this is that it treats moving through a country as a real way of knowing it. You learn a place through your windshield and your boots. The paper maps and the gas stations and the weather that won't cooperate. Same reason I keep saying the back roads tell you more than the interstate ever will, whether it's Route 66 or whatever two-lane gets you through Saskatchewan.

If you've got a long drive coming up this fall, and I've got two of them on the books myself, an audiobook like this would ride along nicely. Hearing about empty northern country while you're watching empty country roll by. Hard to beat.

I may never write the Canada trip myself. But if I do, I'll do it the Theroux way. Slow, on the ground, talking to everybody who'll stand still for it.