With in-flight cutbacks and carry-on restrictions, flying has become so unpleasant that perhaps it's time to get back to basics: looking out the window.

Window Seat Europe: Reading the Landscape From the Air (Chronicle Books, $20.95) directs your attention away from the cabin. Author Gregory Dicum insists on a window seat every time. “Taking a commercial passenger flight is one of the unheralded joys of life in the modern world,” he writes. “Sure, the food might be utilitarian, the seat cramped, and your neighbour annoying, but the sheer pleasure of contemplating our planet from 10 kilometres up in the air is worth any price. A century ago, nobody on Earth could have hoped to see this view, and yet it's yours””free””with every flight you take.”

Well, when you put it that way. Window Seat Europe follows the same formula as Dicum's 2004 Window Seat that focused on North America. With the aid of colour aerial photos, he divides up the region and points out what to look for. It's not about spotting the Eiffel Tower but reading the landscape and learning a new “visual vocabulary” to distinguish features from on high. He outlines the geographical layers such as rock, water, plants, and man-made objects like highways, and how they influence one another. It's like an art and geography lesson at 35,000 feet. There's also a chapter on the sky, with illustrations of the different types of clouds and an answer to that timeless question of why the sky is blue.

I took Window Seat along on a recent flight east from Vancouver. Even from the middle seat, the view down on the Rockies was undeniably impressive. A tableau of rippled earth dotted with brilliant aquamarine lakes, craggy peaks poking through pristine snow””one forgets how magical it really is.

Then the guy next to me shut the window shade.