Formative Literature
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I was an avid reader in my early to late teens. The earliest books I remember reading were Mark Twain. After than I when through my Ernest Hemingway period. Nick Adams was my hero. Before college I was into Faulkner, since I could relate to the southern setting of much of his work. At the time, I wanted to move to Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, but couldn’t find it. Once I got into college, however, I went though my Budwieser period. I still remember my favorite quote during this time:
“This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive Beechwood Aging produces a taste, a smoothness and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price.”
which we could recite at any time, and often did (college kids do some strange things when under the influence).
Kinda funny that this gets posted, I was thinking about some of the stuff I used to read just the other day…
I always read a lot when I was a kid, but keep in mind that I’m only 19…
I spent my school years in rural areas that have stayed rural to this day. We never owned a television.
Does a stack of Mad magazines count as a book? Oh yeah, there was a paperback of the early Bob Kane Batman comics I read several times.
I think flyfishing came naturally after thinking about Batman’s use of rope.
You asked!
Zach, the company I work for is based in Lowell. My first visit in 1995 the only place I remember being able to get a bite to eat in Lowell was Scotty’s. Things have certainly changed in NWA since then.
When I was about 14 years old and getting into fly fishing I took out a copy of Fishless Days, Angling Nights by Sparse Grey Hackle. The book essentially chronicles what’s known as the “Golden Age” of fly fishing in the Catskills (basically the 1920’s-1950’s). I fished up in the Catskills quite a bit and the book definitely made me appreciate the history and tradition of the area.
Much later in life (in my late twenties), I read The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass by Peter Kaminsky. It chronciles a two month period where this dude kind of dropped out and went chasing Stripers, Blues and Little Tunny at Montauk, NY. A few months after reading it, I moved from NYC area to Newport, RI… got into sight fishing for stripers, bought a center console and discovered the unbelievable saltwater fishing at Martha’s Vineyard. I never thought anything could pull me away from casting dries over wild browns.
I started with Encyclopedia Brown books as a kid and read every Outdoor Life and Field and Stream that came to our house.
The following is an excerpt of an essay I wrote several years ago on my must read river fishing books. It is about my first angling book which has now led to a library of over 400 titles plus over 300 digital versions of pre-1928 literature.
Worming and Spinning For Trout – Jerome B. Wood (1959). Without a doubt, this one book published seven years before I graduated from high school, has had more influence on my fishing success than any other. The cover price was $3.95 and my mother brought it home one afternoon and gave it to me after she found it on a bargain table for $1 at a local bookstore in my home town of Pasadena, California. It still has the $1 price tag on the cover. At the time, my fishing was limited to an occasional trip to the beach piers at Newport or Huntington Beach with my parents or one of the local reservoirs in search of “Velveta Trout”. But things were changing. A friend of mine and I at the time were beginning to venture off into the canyons of the San Gabriel Mountains behind where we lived in search of native rainbow trout. Completely uneducated about real trout fishing, my mom decided I needed a book. Thus I came into procession of Worming and Spinning For Trout—a book solely devoted to catching difficult trout in heavily fished waters in Western New York. Unlikely as that might seem to apply to a Southern California teenager, three chapters—13-How to Spot Trout Hides, 17-Stream Approach, and 18-Spinning for Big Trout taught me how to catch fish in rivers and streams. A mere 156 pages, this book has been read countless times. Out of this book, I learned the technique of upstream spinning.
“Only now and then will you hear or read about upstream spinning for trout. It is a relatively rare method, [in 1959] but one that will consistently out fish any other spinning technique on most trout streams.”
That’s the opening paragraph in Chapter 18-Spinning for Big Trout. It was true in 1959, and although not unknown as a technique today, I still believe it is the most consistently successful method for fishing rivers and streams for trout, bass and anything else that swims therein. I catch a lot of fish and I would estimate that 90% or more of my casts when using ultra-light spinning gear are of the upstream techniques I learned in this book. In Chapter 17-Stream Approach I learned probably one of the most singularly important pieces of stream fishing advice in my fishing life:
“Be constantly on the lookout for such second-best opportunities. You must find them if you want to do better than average. Many other anglers are making the obvious approaches, fishing the obvious hides. What you want in heavily-fished streams is the less-obvious setup. Be a piscatorial rebel who refuses to follow the flock. It pays off.”
As I matured and entered the U.S. Air Force in the late 1960s I was blessed with lots of opportunities to fish in rivers and streams. Whenever I did, I was geared up for and using upstream spinning and stream reading techniques I learned in this wonderful book. Worming and Spinning for Trout was my inspiration.
Although I subsequently became devoted to Fly Fishing, this book and its lessons are still valid today.
Very interesting thread. I’m not sure my reading had as much of an impact on my love of the outdoors as life in general. I lived on a farm until I was about seven and grew up around fishing and hunting. My mom tells a story that when we moved I would ride my bike up and down the street saying, “Where are my trees?” That sounds about right.
I couldn’t get enough of The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald when I was in grade school. I think I read every Black Stallion book too (by Walter Farley). I remember liking the exotic locations of the Stallion books.
I’ve developed a pretty eclectic library since then. A mixed bag of science fiction (William Gibson, Neal Stephenson), mysteries (William Tapply, John D. McDonald, recently John Galligan), fishing and hunting (Tapply, Gierach, Sparse Gray Hackle, Leeson, Babb, too many to name here), fiction (Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison), adventure (Joe Simpson – if you have never read Touching the Void, you should, Tasker, Boardman, Krakauer) and classics (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez). I’ll read just about anything that is written well with an intriguing story to tell.
Zach Smith – Definitley check out William Tapply for some good fishing essays (and hunting too in my opinion). Trout Eyes and Pocket Water are two really good ones. For hunting, his book Upland Days is good and I am looking forward to Upland Autumn: Birds, Dogs and Shotgun Shells due out in a couple of months. Unfortunately, he just passed away and his voice will be missed.
My favorite series of books from the ages of about 9 to about 11–my creek-raiding days–were Jim Kjelgaard’s stories of boys with their dogs in the wilderness. “Big Red” is the most famous; I also recall titles like “Stormy” (about a black lab), “Outlaw Red” (naturally, about Big Red’s son), etc. I read as many of Kjelgaard’s stories as I could find at the local public library. Today I see from Kjelgaard’s Wikipedia entry that I must have missed a bunch of them.
Recently I picked up a copy of “Stormy” at a used book store, for a few cents. I was amazed at the complex level of the writing – this must have been pretty difficult stuff for me at 10 years old. In fact, the stories still hold up to a modern magazine level of writing and would be worth reading. Sadly, I just learned from Kjelgaard’s Wikipedia entry that he committed suicide at the age of 48. That bothers me; he made a big difference in my life, setting me to dreaming about places more wild than I could get to at that age, but have now visited. Zach
Zach, I remember reading these same stories….guess that might explain getting into Labs for quite a while (field trials, hunting) especially after Stormy…
I also loved Paddle To The Sea when I was younger….books by Farley Mowat…..read Roderick Haig Brown…..grew up reading my Dad’s books of Canadian writer/humourist/angler Greg Clark….and reading anything I could on fishing like one by Canadian outdors writer Tiny Bennet (not sure of title) on how to fish for game fish….read Field and Stream/Outdoor Life/Ontario Out Of Doors…guess all that led me astray didn’t it LOL LOL
I don’t know another human being with a worse memory than my own, so recalling an entire list of books from 25 years ago is pretty tough…however, Wilson Rawls “Where the Red Fern Grows” left quite an undeniable impression on me as a 8 year old boy.
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