Fishing and Other Outdoor Pursuits

[Patrick Murtha]

…which could include hunting, hiking, spelunking, rock climbing and mountaineering, rock and shell collecting, bird and mammal watching, etc, all of which have spawned their own corpora of writing. There is overlap with sports on the one side and natural history on the other.

Although I’m unlikely to read hunting books, because killing birds and mammals is in no way appealing to me, I am OK with fishing (I accept the contradiction there) and have done a little myself. Fishing literature is peculiar in that, right from the source, Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Angler (1653-76) - a masterpiece of English prose - it has been resolutely philosophical in nature. As it started, so it continued. And it is an ENORMOUS literature - dedicated collectors can amass hundreds or thousands of volumes.

A comparatively recent example in the Walton mode, down to the adoption of his dialogue format, is John Hersey’s Blues (1987).

Of course, there is also fishing fiction. Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It is one of the classics of American literature and of the short novel form. And David James Duncan’s The River Why is supposed to be very good, although I haven’t read it yet. Fishing and hunting weave their way through a lot of regional American fiction.

 

[Liam]

I was never able to get into fishing, despite my grandfather's many attempts to get me interested in the "sport," ?

Everyman's Library has two pocket-sized volumes devoted to fishing: Fishing Stories and The Art of Angling (poems about fishing).

 

[Patrick Murtha]

A lot of fishing these days is catch-and-release - that, or you actually eat the fish you catch, which I don’t have a problem with. Even hunting for food, I can see that, and certainly deer, geese, etc, sometimes need to be thinned ecologically speaking - but again, no appeal for me as an activity, and I don’t like guns in any context. I’d much rather spot, photograph, or even live with an animal (raised a baby raccoon once). Mammal watching is an activity that I follow with interest, although I don’t get to participate much.

Fly tying has a curious attraction - those flies can be quite beautiful. Used to wear them in my lapels.

Big game trophy hunting where the hunters pose with the kill is icky - I’ll make some allowances for the era of Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, and Frank Buck, but nowadays it is distasteful to say the least.