A Sportsman’s Library: 100 Essential, Engaging, Offbeat, and Occasionally Odd Fishing and Hunting Books for the Adventurous Reader
By Stephen J. Bodio. Published by Lyons Press, 2013; $18.95 softbound.
Faced with the prospect of moving to a smaller, more manageable house, I had taken to looking at my tightly packed 80plus feet of bookshelves with the hard eye of a corporate downsizer. It should be easy, I was thinking, to get rid of about a third of the fiction and sporting titles that I’d accumulated over the past 35 years: fewer boxes, easier on the back. Then the big envelope arrived with a review copy of Steve Bodio’s new book, A Sportsman’s Library.
I’ve followed and enjoyed Bodio’s work since the early 1970s, when he wrote terrific book reviews for Gray’s Sporting Journal. An Easterner by birth, a biologist by edu-cation, a nature writer by trade, Bodio moved west 30-plus years ago to a tiny town in New Mexico to write and pursue his interests in literature, pigeons, food, fine guns, fishing, falcons, archeology, art history, coursing hounds, and closer relationships between living, community, and the land. He’s a literate, inquisitive guy who makes no bones about his interest in blood sports (in which he includes fishing) and who articulates a reasoned disdain for many of the knee-jerk pieties of contemporary culture. His previous books, including Good Guns, A Rage For Falcons, Eagle Dreams: Searching For Legends in Wild Mongolia, and Querencia, the latter an elegant memoir of Bodio’s life in Magdalena, New Mexico with his first wife, are well worth seeking out. So, too, is his blog at http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com.
In A Sportsman’s Library,a title that echoes Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, Bodio provides context for, reviews of, and quoted snippets from some of the best writing about chase-related outdoor sport. Three of the selections were written by Russians (Turgenev makes the list,) one by a Spaniard, and one is a medieval treatise on falconry written first in Latin. The remaining 95 are by Americans and Brits.
When I thumbed open the review copy, I landed first on Bodio’s essay on The Last Pool and Other Stories,a 1954 collection of fiction by Patrick O’Brian, author of a brilliant series of novels about the early nineteenth-century British Navy. O’Brian is a favorite of mine, and I knew he hunted, because there’s a picture of him with a shotgun in a biography I once read. But that he fished and wrote stories about fishing? A quick search and $38 was all it took to have copy of The Last Pool winging its way to me from a bookseller in London.
More thumbing through the section on fishing found short essays on Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, William Humphries’s My Moby Dick, Thomas McGuane’s Ninety Two in the Shade, Negley Farson’s Going Fishing, Odell Shepherd’s Thy Rod and Thy Creel, and, in first position in the section on fishing, Sheridan Anderson’s A Curtis Creek Manifesto, still the best book in the history of the universe on learning to fly fish, and also the funniest. Not surprisingly, Meanderings of a Fly Fisherman, by California Fly Fisher’s own Seth Norman, is there, along with John Gierach’s Trout Bum and Russell Chatham’s Dark Waters.
With only a few exceptions, books on hatch matching don’t make the cut, in large part because Bodio admits to being a member of the club that feels most trout can be caught on a properly presented Adams or Hares Ear. Well . . . we all have treasured illusions. At any rate, in each of the 30 chapters in the fishing section, whether I’d already read the book or not, I always learned something new or got a valuable new insight. And along with The Last Pool, I discovered that I needed to own M. H. Salmon’s The Catfish as Metaphor. And why not? It’d only be one more book to move.
The section on wing shooting is a shorter group of 17 titles, but it includes Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, Datus Proper’s Pheasants of the Mind, Charles Fergus’s A Rough Shooting Dog, and novelist/hunter Vance Bourjaily’s perceptive and literate examination of bird hunting, The Unnatural Enemy. Challenging, marvelous works, all of them. I wasn’t familiar with Caroline Gordon’s Aleck Maury, Sportsman, or William Beebe’s Pheasant Jungles, or half a dozen others, but they’re now on the list I carry on a folded three-by-five card in my wallet for when I come across a used book store. Of course, I could probably find them on the Internet — as, shamefully, I did with O’Brian’s The Last Pool — but the net doesn’t have that great aroma of educated mold, and visiting a bookstore inevitably leads me from what I’m searching for to something else. The stores matter almost as much as the books.
The final section of A Sportsman’s Library is titled “General Hunting, Guns, Travel, Mixed and Miscellaneous.” It covers 53 books and is arguably the most interesting part of an overall fine group of choices, because it’s so wide ranging. In it, Bodio writes intelligently about old standbys such as Roy Chapman Andrews’s Across Mongolian Plains, Jim Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon, and Ernest Thompson Seton’s Lives of the Hunted, about fine novels such as William Faulkner’s Big Woods and Ernest Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa, about delicious oddities such as Robert Jones’s bizarre novel Blood Sport, George Leonard Herter’s whacked-out, but still useful Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, and about fine contemporary works such as William Humphries’s Home from The Hill, Tom McGuane’s An Outside Chance, and Jim Harrison’s Just Before Dark. I was disappointed that Bodio didn’t include Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods, a sentimental favorite of mine, but he made up for it by turning me on to Frances Hamerstrom’s Is She Coming Too? and Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson’s A Woman Tenderfoot, two other early to mid-twentieth-century tales of women in challenging outdoor situations.
Along with each essay, there’s a handsome color photo of the front cover of what may have been Bodio’s own copy of the book. Some of these have torn dust jackets, some have faded covers, some are new: a visual feast for the book addict. At the end of most chapters, Bodio (who admits to having had a devil of a time paring his list down to a mere 100 books) provides an “Also Read” section: a short list of titles that share a similar subject matter or spirit. I was tickled to see Bodio recommend, at the end of the chapter on The Curtis Creek Manifesto, not only Harmon Henkin’s Fly Tackle, but California Fly Fisher itself, described as “a continuing exemplar of the unique cross-pollination of nature, art and sport in Northern California.”
Will everybody be pleased with Bodio’s selections or omissions? Of course not. Any such selection is going to be idiosyncratic, and that’s half the fun of it. Bodio’s biases are clear, and he attempts quite reasonably to explain them in the apologia that opens the book. The principles by which he picked or excluded apparently included modesty, since he didn’t include any of his own work among the 100. Querencia, at the very least, would have made my list, as would A Sportsman’s Library itself.
That A Sportsman’s Library is offered only as a trade paperback, rather than in a hardcover edition, annoys me, because I always end up beating up the covers on the darn things. Someone at Lyons Press must be counting pennies, though the upside here is that the paperback retails for only $18.95. With luck, my own copy won’t disintegrate until my heirs have to dispose of my stuff.
But as for paring down my book collection, A Sportsman’s Library has made me see the absolute folly of the idea. A few more boxes won’t make the move that much more difficult. A serious reader can always find space for more good books.
Larry Kenney
Becoming a Thinking Fly Tier: The Way to Rapid Improvement
By Jim Cramer. Published by No Nonsense Fly Fishing Guidebooks, 2013; $27.95 softbound.
“Try thinking,” the professor wrote on my physics midterm exam when I was a freshman in college. He was right. I had done OK in science and math in high school simply by recognizing that a problem was of a certain kind (a genre, really) and applying the method I’d been taught to solve that kind of problem. However, that was just a sophisticated version of rote learning — a swell way to ace standardized tests, but not actually what should be called “thinking.” I nearly flunked the college freshman physics course because nobody had taught me how scientists actually go about thinking.
Fly tyers are a lot like I was back then. We learn there are certain kinds of problems (getting materials to stay on top of the hook, for example), and we learn established ways to deal with them. If we learn new techniques, it’s because they’re handed down by others — we just apply them. And if we veer into “creative” thinking, it usually involves dreaming up some new fly, which, as it usually turns out, is a version of a fly someone else already has thought up. Most fly tyers just apply established protocols to well-defined problems — problems that have been solved for them by others.
Years later, as a professor myself, albeit in a discipline about as far from physics as you can get, I finally understood what my old physics professor had meant and why he was tempted to write such a comment. The comment itself bothered me, and still does: it was his job to teach me how to think like a physicist, and that hadn’t happened. But faced with the same issue in my own discipline, I realized how challenging an undertaking it is to try to teach someone how to “try thinking.”
That challenge is what Jim Cramer takes on in Becoming a Thinking Fly Tier. When trying to meet it myself, I realized there are two possible ways to go. In Becoming a Thinking Fly Tier, Jim Cramer follows both of them.
The first and most important way is to make a distinction between “rules” and “principles.”That’s my claim, not Cramer’s. However, he tacitly employs it throughout the book.
“Rules” are what every student wants to learn: “How should I do this?” they ask. If it’s been done before, there will be an answer for that. It can be communicated, learned, tested for, validated by the imprimatur of authority, and perpetuated in that manner. One of the many pressures that teachers face is the understandable, but pernicious insistence by students that they be told the “how” of things — to be told how to follow the rules.
“Principles,” by contrast, are what every student needs to learn: the general ways in which things work — the energies and resistances of things and of people that underlie the way in which this “this,” whatever it may be, comes into being as a problem or issue and therefore the ways in which it can and can’t be dealt with. Principles involve what is going on and why, and when posed as questions, those words — “What?” and “Why?” — lead to knowledge of the conditions that help determine possible answers to any simply instrumental questions — to the “How?” questions.
“You will see these simple questions repeated in different forms throughout this book,” Cramer writes. “Regardless of how you ask these questions, if you take the time to ask and answer them, your tying will improve and you will be on your way to becoming a thinking fly tier.”
The important thing here is that unlike the answers to “How should I do this?” there are no predetermined answers to the “What?” and “Why?” questions. They’re open-ended. They lead to surprising places. They lead to insights. They lead to what is called “thinking.”
In Becoming a Thinking Fly Tier, the distinction between “rules” and “principles” appears as the contrast between “habit” and “critical thinking.” Cramer writes: “Habit is simply the repetition of doing the same thing over and over in the same manner,” and “because habit allows us to tie without thought, it is the enemy of critical thinking, and without critical thinking our tying will not improve. Even those habits that you consider to be good habits,” he writes, “should be reviewed occasionally” and subjected to critical thinking.
This is not necessarily a comfortable process. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, more radically, “The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
However, the benefits of critical thinking, of seeking to understand and apply principles, rather than to learn rules, make the whole process worthwhile, and most of Becoming a Thinking Fly Tier consists of examples of the kind of insights that becoming a thinking fly tyer can yield. That’s the second way to encourage thought: perform the process of critical thinking as an ethical example, hoping that it’s the process itself and the sorts of results that it yields, not just the specific results themselves, that others will focus on and emulate.
Becoming a Thinking Fly Tier just sparkles with interesting ideas. In the chapter on hackling wet flies, for example, Cramer analyzes what goes on in the hackling process in terms of the physical properties of feathers and hooks. Nothing is more common for a tyer than having hackles go kaflooey in some way — splaying out, slanting the wrong way, just getting out of control. Cramer figures out why and what to do about it. He’s got some great ideas about parachute hackling, too. And in an amazing chapter on adding weight to flies, he measures the actual weight and analyzes the relative effectiveness of beads, eyes, cones, and lead wire. It’s always been a mystery how much weight actually gets added to a fly using these various methods, and now it’s not. That chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
There’s more: a new technique that Cramer calls “thatching” — attaching bunches of material in the manner of a thatched roof to form the body of a fly. There’s a “hook rant” about the ways in which the designations of hook sizes don’t really tell you what you need to know about them. There’s a chapter on what he calls “fast food flies,” quickly tied nymphs using a couple of pieces of marabou that accomplish for subsurface flies what Harry Darbee, another thinking fly tyer, accomplished for dries with his Two-Feather Fly. (That chapter and another, “Put Your Flies on a Diet,” originally appeared in this magazine.) And there are little lagniappes in the form of sidebar “Fly Notions” that suggest a whole raft of interesting ideas, such as using organza tape for nymph gills. There’s a lot more than that, actually.
I could go on, but to do so would misrepresent the emphasis of the book. In fact, although Cramer flushes ideas from the underbrush of fly-tying traditions like a bird dog flushes quail, the appeal of such ideas points to the tension between these two ways to encourage people to “try thinking”: the more dazzling the results, the more likely they will get in the way of asking the kinds of questions that produced them. The natural interest in “How?” can detract from the focus on “What?” and “Why?” You certainly can buy this book for the results of Jim Cramer’s critical thinking, but you should buy it because it encourages you to think for yourself.
Jim Cramer is an engineer who used to work at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, and the habits of thought that he advocates here are particularly characteristic of an engineer’s approach to materials and their applications. Actually, many of the best fly tyers I know have a background in engineering and mechanics. (They also tend to be left-handed, but that’s just weird.) At fly-tying demonstrations and angling shows, they can and will tell you exactly why they make every move they make when tying a particular fly, why they use the materials they use, and why they put this wrap right there. Jim Cramer wants you to aspire to be like them: “Once you seriously become a thinking fly tyer, you should be able to explain to a student or even another more advanced tyer why you perform a tying step the way that you do. You should be able to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of alternate approaches.” The way you arrive at that point is by striving to be able to make those same explanations to yourself.
In the acknowledgments of the book, I’m thanked in embarrassingly profuse terms, having been involved at a very early stage in the shaping of the manuscript, but as an editor, I don’t have to like the material on which I work — my job is just to try to make it better. Obviously, I like this book a lot, but I like it because I now try thinking every time I sit down at the vise. I like it because it’s made me a better fly tyer.
Bud Bynack
Stillwater Fly-Fishing Secrets
By Hal Janssen. Published by the Hal Janssen Company, 2011; $49.99 hardbound.
Hal Janssen’s self-published Stillwater Fly-Fishing Secrets is a monumental work by a well-known Western angler that sums up keen observations made over a lifetime. As the foreword by Russell Chatham states, “This is not a book for the casual weekend fisherman, or for dreamers, for instance, whose attention is in any way disrupted by a passing flock of starlings when they are supposed to be fishing.” It is a book for serious study and a book that should be in any serious angler’s library. I think it will become a classic.
It has been said that few claim to have spoken with a fish, and if so, that in itself makes them highly suspect. Hal Janssen tries to get into a fish’s mind and to relate its behavior to things an angler can do to increase success. The result is a complete, systematic approach to fly fishing in still waters. Some biologists would disagree with some of his claims, about trout, and I know a physicist who has questioned some of Janssen’s statements about light and optics as they relate to fly tackle, but every outstanding angler is an excellent observer, and Hal Janssen is an excellent angler.
As Stillwater Fly-Fishing Secrets makes clear, you have to invest lots of thought and effort into becoming a better stillwater angler, because this is a complex endeavor. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the stillwater environment, including trout behavior, weather and its influences, aquatic vegetation, and the foundations of the food chain. Chapter 3 covers the senses that a trout possesses, including trout vision, and also deals with trout behavior. Chapter 4 then covers aquatic insects and fundamental stillwater angling techniques.
Following chapter 5’s discussion of fly tying and fly hooks, nine detailed chapters cover trout food, the ways that trout prey behaves, flies that mimic the colors, sizes, and profiles of the things trout eat, and the “keys” that cause trout to accept imitations as naturals. Janssen doesn’t think trout can see detail particularly well, but paradoxically, he does incorporate important key details in his flies.
I can remember sessions in Andy Puyans’s Creative Sports Fly Shop in the 1970s, during which Hal and I drank in Andy’s lessons on the use of quality materials and the importance of proportion. Hal takes such insights to another level in his fly tying. His flies aren’t the “bench queens” of fly-tying shows, but are very good imitations that reflect proper proportions and colors. I’m looking at some of his flies that he tied when he visited my club, Gold Country Fly Fishers, a year or so ago. I copy these, because I treasure them and won’t fish the originals.
A classic debate in fly-fishing circles is whether imitation or presentation is the most important factor in getting a trout to take a fly. I can remember a campfire discussion with Bob Baiocchi, Walton Powell, and several others. Walton was a staunch “presentationist,” stating that night that any trout could be caught on a Humpy if it is presented right. Hal Janssen solves the riddle by being both “presentationist” and “imitationist.” Most think of presentation as a skill relating to moving water. Hal Janssen redefines it in Stillwater Fly-Fishing Secrets. Everything in his book relates to his method of accomplishing all facets of the best possible presentation and imitation.
Perhaps my favorite chapter is on damselflies. I remember a story told long ago around a campfire somewhere in Montana. The story goes that a group of anglers were anchored in prams near one of the famous springs in Henry’s Lake. Nobody was catching fish. Suddenly, Hal Janssen upped anchor and repositioned his pram so he was retrieving his damselfly imitation towards the shore, where they crawl out, not toward the spring or the deeper part of the lake. Soon, he was into big trout.
Some will find reason to disagree in the chapters on equipment. Hal may be old-fashioned in his thoughts on rods and fly lines, but there is method in his madness on knots and leaders. Do we really need to dye our fly lines and always fish 22-foot leaders?
At $49.99, the standard edition of Stillwater Fly-Fishing Secrets is a very nice book with illustrations that reflect Hal’s artistic background and his talent as a painter. I particularly like the drawings of plankton, trout food organisms, and the major plant species. There’s also a limited edition and a limited fine edition that sell for $100 and $150 respectively and that include more drawings, fly plates, and inscriptions. The fly paintings and colored insect renderings are impressive, comparable to those in Ernest Schwiebert’s monumental Nymphs. Stillwater Fly-Fishing Secrets is a much more practical book, however. It is printed on excellent stock that does justice to Hal’s beautiful artwork and charts, all of which help illustrate his deeply held convictions about successful stillwater fly angling.
Trent Pridemore
Where a Trout Calls Home
By Mike Costello. Illustrated by Wayman Lee. Published by Pacific Adventures Publishing, 2013; $25.95 hardbound, $19.95 softbound.
“Delightful” is a not a word in my general vocabulary. In fact, it’s possible that I’ve never written the word before. For Where a Trout Calls Home, though, “delightful” is the perfect word. From the first page, I smiled — I even said so when I wrote to Richard Anderson to I pitch him the idea of a book review. Several days later, Dan Blanton wrote on his bulletin board about how he, too, smiled while reading the book. Well, there are two old curmudgeons using the word “smile” while describing reading a children’s book. That speaks volumes in several ways about old curmudgeons. I think it also says something about this book.
I don’t know how someone could write a better children’s book about fish, stream ecology, and fly fishing. As far as I know, nothing close to the quality of Where a Trout Calls Home has ever been published. It would even make a great screenplay. It is the story of two rainbow trout, Timmy and Riley, and their cadre of stream-dwelling buddies and potential killers, such as Sammy the Striper. Sammy ultimately becomes their bodyguard against the “smelly fork-tail pike minnows.”
The story follows the trout through the four seasons and their challenges of adapting to changing food menus, new friends, and becoming reacquainted with old allies who have returned to the river after an extended stay in the sea. Of course, the book would not be complete without a few interactions with wily fly fishers who deceptively disguise hooks as tasty morsels. Fortunately for Timmy and Riley, the anglers practice catch-and-release fly fishing, and once the trout are free, they become “the talk of the pool.” Cracks me up.
Wayman Lee’s wonderful illustrations pop and truly make this a children’s book. My only regret is that his drawings don’t grace every page. From more than a few years of reading to children, I believe they expect a new picture every time a page gets turned. I’m not really certain which age group Mike Costello has targeted, but I think he just covey-shot the demographics and hit everyone between 1 and a 100. It’s a job exceedingly well done.
Ralph Cutter
