A friend once said of her own fishing experiences, “Often the catching has been slim, but the fishing has always been memorable!” I would add, “And so are the books about the sport.” In fact, the best reason to take up fishing (in my view) is that you will have a perfect excuse to read all the great fishing literature, beginning with Izaak Walton’s little masterpiece of pastoral life and the joys of fishing, The Compleat Angler, or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation. And even if you don’t like fishing—baiting the hook, releasing the fish, or eating the catch—there’s still a good chance you’ll enjoy these books by people who love the whole process.

Norman Maclean begins A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories with the unforgettable sentence: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing,” and goes on to describe how the joy of fishing sometimes becomes the means by which everything that can’t be said overtly is communicated from one family member to another.

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A Different Angle: Fly Fishing Stories by Women, edited by Holly Morris, is filled with essays and stories by contributors including E. Annie Proulx, Lorian Hemingway, Pam Houston, and fly-fishing champion Joan Salvato Wulff. Morris also edited another collection of essays, fiction, and poetry about the satisfaction of fishing for women, Uncommon Waters: Women Write about Fishing.



Fishing’s Best Short Stories, edited by Paul D. Staudohar, offers a rich collection ranging from classic tales by the Brothers Grimm and Guy de Maupassant to the more modern fireside yarns of contemporary fishing writers such as Thomas McGuane and Stephen King.

It’s hard to choose the best book by the incomparable John Gierach, so you may as well just read and enjoy them all, but start with Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders: A John Gierach Fly-Fishing Treasury, the best of his best essays from earlier collections. Once hooked, you’ll want to read these as well: At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman; Another Lousy Day in Paradise; and Sex, Death, and Fly-Fishing.

If you get a serious case of the fishin’ bug, you’ll probably want to own two copies of Dave Hughes’s Trout Flies: The Tier’s Reference—one to keep in your home library and one to use while you’re tying flies. Beautiful color photographs show the artistry involved in making flies that will fool the trout into thinking they’re real.


Robert Hughes is best known as an art critic. Who knew he was a fisherman as well? Not me, until I ran across his lovely collection of essays on the sport, A Jerk on One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman.

A beginner’s growing love of the art and craft of fly-fishing, primarily in Northwest rivers, is joyfully described by Jessica Maxwell, former columnist for Audubon magazine, in I Don’t Know Why I Swallowed the Fly: My Fly-Fishing Rookie Season.

Thomas McGuane, an author who is best known for his exquisitely tough and gritty fiction (try Ninety-Two in the Shade and The Sporting Club), won the coveted Roderick Haig-Brown Award for Literature from the Federation of Fly Fishers for The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing, a collection of beautifully written essays on everything from practicing casting to the pleasures of releasing that just-caught fish.

David James Duncan’s first novel, The River Why, describes the coming-of-age of Gus Orviston, in which his search for the elusive steelhead on Oregon’s rivers mirrors his search for self-knowledge.

There’s also a wonderfully funny section in Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond (which has nothing, really, to do with fishing otherwise) about Anglicans angling. Don’t miss it.