Another Lousy Day in Paradise & Dances with Trout

Description

Details

Two of John Gierach’s most popular fishing books are collected in one volume – a double dose of delight for longtime fans or first-time visitors to Gierach country. This is a great book to grab when you want to read just a few pages that might make up one essay, or if you want to snuggle down and read for several hours. Careful with that, though – you may just devour more than you expect to in one sitting!

As Gierach astutely observes in Dances with Trout, “Fly-fishing is solitary, contemplative, misanthropic, scientific in some hands, poetic in others, and laced with conflicting aesthetic considerations. It’s not even clear if catching fish is actually the point.” This observation might also describe Gierach’s writing – catching fish might be the subject, but most of the fun and (mis)adventure comes well before that point. Whether it’s fishing close to home waters (Colorado) or farther afield (Alaska, Scotland, Texas); ice-fishing, tournament fishing, or night fishing; fishing for trout, salmon, carp, splake, or grayling; fishing with familiar companions, no detail of the fishing life is too insignificant or too absurd for Gierach.

As he writes in Another Lousy Day in Paradise, “The real truth about fly-fishing is, it is beautiful beyondin almost every way, and when a certain kind of person is confronted with a certain kind of beauty, they are either saved or ruined for life, or a little bit of both.” So start reading and be saved – or ruined – by Gierach’s wonderful insights into the world around us.

• Black & White illustrations by Glenn Wolff