Group,

When Teddy Roosevelt went on safari in Africa way back in 1909, he brought with him what he called his "pigskin library" so that he would have something to read during the down time spent in camp.

I'm curious if anyone else besides myself around the ol' cyberfire does the same thing, and if so, what do you bring to read by the flickering flames when you're camping out?

Here's what I bring....

1) Holy Bible, New King James Version. I like to take Jesus with me when I fish. I also happen to think that the Apostle Paul was a literary genius.

2) Baa Baa Black Sheep, by Col. Gregory Boyington, USMC. I've read this book cover to cover at least a hundred times, and the only thing about it that I don't like is that I can't put the damned thing down once I get started on it. He was either a naturally gifted writer or had the help of a very talented "ghost," because his personal saga manages to communicate the fears and emotions of men in combat better than anyone who has ever written on the subject.

3) The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, by Ernest Hemingway. Make no mistake, Mrs. Macomber knew what she was doing when she leveled the 6.5 mm Mannlicher on her husband's head and pulled the trigger......

4) To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. If I ever wrote anything as good as that book, I'd never write another damned thing.

5) The Green Hills of Africa, by Ernest Hemingway. Hey, it's a book about pursuit -the pursuit of art, the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of respect, the pursuit of meaning in life. All of that kudu hunting stuff is also pursuit, but it's really just icing on the cake.

6) Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. I had a class in college that was taught by a professor who's mission in life seemed to be one of proving to minds full of mush that Steinbeck couldn't write. It didn't work with me, but then my mind was pretty much made up about the goodness of John Steinbeck's work by the time I was a freshman in high school, and the Dear Pedagouge couldn't change it.

These are books that I never leave home without if I'm going to be gone for more than a day.

--JP

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"I fish, therefore I am."

If the book's any good, it might tempt me to keep turning pages rather than switch to fishing. So, on trips, I prefer to bring reading material that's quick to go through, easy to put down -- like a magazine. For breadth of interesting stories and engaging prose, my top choice would have to be The New Yorker, which as a weekly tends to pile up largely unread until a significant block of free time, like a fishing trip, presents itself.

Gee Richard..your amoung the Few I know who actually read the New Yorker...LOL!!!!!
I tend to bring Wildlife Guides, Flyfishing Guides for the area I'm fishing. Also I love to bring along anything from HAIG-BROWN. Rodrick is my favorite Fishing writer...but, as stated by Others, Gierach is always welcomed.
I'd also say that my trusty Delorme Atlas & Gazetters are carried... to find my way from time to time, but more so to do Recon for other places I Might beable to wet a line... There's all sorts of Pencil marks & scribblings on the Maps & in the borders... a Treasure Map if you will.......

DEAN...

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"Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride" Hunter S. Thompson

Dean, I had never actually read TNY until a friend passed along a few back issues (one of which had an essay by John McPhee on fishing for shad), and the dang things blew me away. The writing can be topical or timeless, but either way it is always well-crafted, and even stories that on their face look utterly uninteresting will often pull me in. Hey, I'm a fan....

I like a magazine; Rollingstone, Mojo, Outside... or short stories and I have to say, The Short Happy Life of Frances(?) McComber left a big impression in my schooling years as did The Sun Also Rises (remember the idyllic fishing "scene"). I go for Raymond Carver, Bukowski, John Steinbeck, and field guides; birds, trails etc. Now I'm heading for the fast food thread, because that's where I'm really needed. Read. Anything.
Marc

Following the ideas of Dan, Dean, and Marc, I'd like to add that I've brought angling-related books along on fishing trips, usually collections of pieces by such writers as Gierach, Russell Chatham, and Tom McGuane. In fact, to my taste, McGuane's "The Longest Silence" is prob'ly the finest compilation of fishing essays published in the last hundred years.

And a side note to JP -- If you enjoy war memoirs, I recommend George MacDonald Frazier's "Quartered Safe Out Here," about his experiences with the British Army during the Burma campaign, along with "Goodbye, Darkness" by William Manchester and "With the Old Breed" by E. B. Sledge; both of these writers were enlistees with the Marines in the Pacific Theater. Harder to find, but worth the search, are "Brazen Chariots," by Robert Crisp (who served as a British tank officer in North Africa), and "The Forgotten Soldier," by Guy Sajer (who served with the Wehrmacht on the Russian Front). And although it's not a soldier's story, Michael Herr's "Dispatches" captures well the chaos, surrealism, and heartbreak of the war in Viet Nam.

Richard,

Thanks for the suggestions on military memoirs. Although Boyington's book is one of my all-time favorite reads, I wouldn't say that I'm a huge fan of the genre. In the case of Baa Baa Black Sheep, I like it for the quality of the writing as much as or maybe even more than the subject matter. For example, when I was a kid, I read a book religious The Black Ace of Germany--an aerial combat memoir, similar in concept to Boyington's, but very different in excecution. In the Black Ace, after getting along to the monotonous, repititious twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth kill, I was hoping that sombody--anybody--would shoot the bastard down and get it over with and put him out of my misery. It might have been a gripping read in German, and perhaps it lost something in translation. I dunno.... I guess some of my aversion to books like this in the present has to do with the fact that I saw enough of humankind's inhumanity to other humans during my law enforcement days to last several lifetimes, and I'm not overly anxious to read about that sort of thing in a book. That said, I'll still give the war memoir type of thing a try every now and then, because in some cases--like Boyington's book--the stories have much more to offer than simply telling the reader what a hero the writer is because he survived dire straits and was instrumental in seeing to it that a large number of the opposition didn't. If a book of this nature is written well--and I can safely assume that those you mentioned are, or you wouldn't have suggested them--then I'll probably like it. Now, the problem is one of finding them....

--JP

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"I fish, therefore I am."

Here's another idea for reading material to take along on fishing trips which was sparked by a separate e-mail from JP: the crime novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Both writers are exemplars of the hard-boiled Noir style (and were largely influential in creating it), and both tend to use California settings in their works. Sure, such books are "mental floss," but they tend to speak a little more toward the human condition than most other genre fiction (assuming one wants that), and are darn good reads, as well.

Here's a question: any good mysteries out there than involve fly fishing? I don't recall having come across any myself, although I think Richard Hugo and Robert Crumley (sp?) might have used plot elements that involved angling. Has anyone come across anything interesting?

Richard,
My boss leant me a book recently called Dying to Fly Fish by David Leitz which is apparently part of a series of "Max Addams Fly Fishing Mysteries." I think there are two or three. Another is called Casting in Dead Water. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Also, I agree with the Noir genre opinion. For some reason, whenever I'm traveling I always end up with a new Elmore Leonard paperback, more pulp than noir but fun and engaging.
Marc
PS: I just had a look on Amazon and it looks like there are 4 Fly Fishing Mysteries by David Leitz, a new one in hardback, but the other 3 are out of print w/ limited availability.

Group,

Richard made reference to Raymond Chandler's work as being "mental floss" and there was a time when I couldn't have agreed with him more. I couldn't appreciate it when I was forced to read some of it in college. The world Chandler painted in words was one so alien to me that I didn't understand it. They say that wisdom comes with age, and a lot of water has flowed underneath my personal bridge since my college days -a decade-long tenure in law enforcement, a brief period of starvation as a long-haul truck driver, a living made as a licensed guide, early attempts at turning writing into a career, and so on, have combined to make me who I am today. I'm older now and hopefully wiser, or at least wise enough to know that I was once a wise-ass who thought I knew it all but knew nothing and finally matured enough to admit it.

I recently re-read The Big Sleep -the first time I read it was over twenty years ago- and this time, once I got started on it, I couldn't put the thing down. I found much to appreciate and admire in it and found myself contemplating as to why I had gotten so little out this book the first time that I read it. I think part of the reason why I got so little out of it the first time was that my expectations weren't very high and I started off with a predjudice against it as being unworthy literature -or mindless "mental floss", as Richard put it. Flash-forward to the present time and I now understand what I was supposed to have learned in college all those many years ago and I can now see that The Big Sleep is far from being a simple story about a simple murder. It's actually a complex and exceptionally well-crafted story about the influence of wealth and social standing and how those things can cloud the collective judgement of those who have them, and how the quest to obtain them can cloud the collective judgement of those who don't have them and want them. What seems superfical and shallow is actually a rather deep and profound "class warfare" kind of tale. Craft-wise, it's flawless in the way it's put together. Chandler painted the mental of image of a setting every bit as well as Hemingway or any other American writer did. I mean, here's a guy that has you convinced that you can not only see what Phillip Marlowe sees and feel what he feels but can in fact even smell pre-war L.A. as it smelled back in his day -and it stank, both literally and figuratively. His dialogue stuff is as good as you'll find in anything by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald and the players in the story come across as real individuals with unique speech, mannerisms and views of the world around them. You can see Eddie Mars as a guy who acts like he's so sure of himslef when he really isn't, and you can see right throuh him just as Marlowe can and you can also see that General Sternwood's daughters act like they aren't sure of themselves when they think they really are. The underlying theme is that "there is more here than meets the eye" -that there is something hidden under a venieer that few actually care to discover or are capable of discovering. It's only mindless, diversionary entertainment if you turn your brain off while you read it. If you turn your brain on, you'll be surprised at what you'll get out of this book and you'll easily see Chandler as the product of his class-conscious English Public School upbringing that he was.

Yeah, being a reformed former Chandler-Basher is a lot like being a former "gag-sparker" in that just as one who kicks the habit often wants everyone they know who smokes to give up smoking, too, I'd like to see everyone who read Chandler once and dismissed his work as a sophmoric waste of time come around to appreciating it for the well-crafted art that it really is. It might be true that if one of Chandler's stories was a painting, it would be more like Norman Rockwell or C.M. Russell than Picaso or Van Gough, but it's still art, never the less, and certainly worthy of inclusion in anyone's "pigskin library".

-JP

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"I fish, therefore I am."

I'm late to enter this thread because I've been brooding a bit on the subjects of reading and fishing. The result is that I'm beginning to see the two activities as competitors for time and interest, although mutually energizing ones. Most of the time, when I'm fishing, or driving somewhere to fish, or trying to find the jar of cumin or the bottle of Marsala that were supposed to be in the camp cook box, or staring mindlessly, with a glass of wine in my hand, at the fire or the motel room wall after 10 or so hours on the water, I don't think of reading. No mind left with which to do it. And inattentive reading, like inattentive fishing, is to me pretty unsatisfying. Which isn't to say that when I'm paying attention I do either the fishing or the reading with any skill: simply that I prefer, for important things, a single focus. If I bring a book or a magazine on a fishing trip, it rarely gets any serious attention. Still, reading, including reading in the field of angling literature, clearly informs my fishing by grounding me in the how-to's, where-to's and what-to-do-it-with's, and in historical, literary and ethical loci that matter, especially if you see fly fishing, as I do, as more than a way to catch fish. Similarly, the focused concentration of fly fishing, of being on and in the water, resets my switches, erases most of the daily stresses of getting and spending, and lets me read with a more open, a more critical mind. I don't know which of the old admonitions applies better here: "there's a time and a place for everything", or "do it with thy might."

That said, of fishing mysteries, I know of a slender few, David Leitz' Max Adams stories among them. Michigan also gives us Joseph Heywood of The Snow Fly fame, who frequently brings fishing into his recentWoods Cop series. Apart from Michigan, Florida seems to be the state where most of the pop fiction centering on fishing is set. Carl Hiassen, surely one of the day's finest crafters of intelligent, over-the-top, mind rot, is an angler and ardent conservationist, and Double Whammy, one of his earlier novels, puts a wonderful simultaneous spin on the excesses of both the pro bass fishing circuit and greedy TV evangelists. Well worth a read. James W. Hall, another Floridian, has a reclusive protagonist, with the silly single name of Thorn, who makes his slender living tying bonefish flies when he isn't out righting wrongs. There's another writer out there whose name I can't put my finger on right now, with two first names like Bill Bob or the like, who does travel writing for Outside and also has a novel with a tarpon guide as protagonist. And thinking of Florida, you can't call yourself a well rounded reader of intelligent mind rot without a thorough grounding in John D. Macdonald's Travis McGee series, though there's not much fishing here. MacDonald, along with Ross Thomas, Elmore Leonard and Ross Macdonald, carried the torch of intelligent suspense writing into the 60s and set the standard for everyone else. Great stuff. Moving away from Florida, fly fishing, and fishing in general turns up as a topoi of sorts in the works of Rocky Mountain writers like Jamie Harris and Robert Crumley, and in the novels of Oregonians Craig Leslie and David James Duncan (the latter now expatriated to Montana). Leslie's The Sky fisherman is a must for anyone who's ever fished the Deschutes, and Duncan's The River Why is simply a must. I've chanced across a few other mysteries and popular suspense novels that use fishing as a major plot element, but most have seemed so lame that I've left them on the shelf. And I'm continually puzzled by the fact that no one in California, arguably a pretty decent market for books in general, popular paperback fiction in specific, and certainly a state with some of the finest fly fishing in the country, hasn't spawned a mystery/suspense fly fishing novelist of its own.

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DC Ounty
San Francisco

DC, thanks for reminding me of Joseph Heywood's The Snowfly, a marvelously inventive thriller that certainly has the unfortunate effect of keeping its readers turning pages rather than casting flies. And in checking Amazon, I'm surprised to learn it hasn't come out in paperback, despite the hardbound edition having been published nearly four years ago...

I forgot to list a series of mysteries by William Tapply that frequently involve fly fishing: First Light, A Shadow of Death, A Fine Line and others. Brady Coyne is his protagonists name. Nothing special, but not bad. Amazon shows Tapply as author of a book on the craft of mystery writing that's due out this summer, which should be worth a look.

And kick my butt for incorrectly listing James Crumley's first name as Robert. Anyone unfamiliar with Crumley's The Last Good Kiss is missing a great read (though there's no fly fishing in it). The first sentence is a classic: "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

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DC Ounty
San Francisco

Rich - Chandler and Hammet are certainly not "mental floss" (whatever that might be; I haven't a clue). I have a simple standard by which I judge a writer, and it is this: if I can reread a book some years later and get the same, or more, enjoyment from it as I did the first time I read it, then the writer is a good writer and the book a fine book. These are the books I keep. The rest go to the local used-book store.

By this metric both Chandler and Hammet rate near the top of my pantheon of good writers - great reads when I first read them thirty or so years ago, and still great reads today. I'd also add the early mysteries of Crumley and Richard Hoyt as faves - although the later works of both are, in my opinion, pretty bad. And I'll toss in Stephen Dobyns "Saratoga" series, which always have me chuckling whenever I reread them.

Other recommended reads? Let's see...

Travel books are always fun. Here are a few keepers:
o "Brazilian Adventure," by Peter Fleming (yes, Ian had a brother!). Amusing and diverting.
o "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush," by Eric Newby. Another amusing and diverting first-person travel book. What is it with these English writers?
o "Arabian Sands," by Wilfred Thesiger. Not so amusing as the others (despite the fact that he's English), but worth the read never the less.

Some interesting memoirs:
o "The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston," by Siegried Sassoon. Actually a compilation of three books originally published independently (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress). Sassoon is an English writer, and through his alter-ego, Sherston, Sassoon describes his life before, during, and after that bloody wreck known as World War I.
o "Survival at Auschwitz," and "The Reawakening," both by Primo Levi. Great great great.
o "My Last Sigh," by Luis Bunuel. Intriguing reflections upon a number of intriguing topics while Bunuel recounts an intriguing life. E.g. a dry martini: let a ray of sulight pass through the bottle of vermouth and strike the gin.

I'm thirsty!

- jca