Posts from the “Lit” Category

BOOK REVIEW: Marquesa

Posted on January 19th, 2012

Marquesa is a book penned well before the existence of blogs, but it is the type of published work every fly fishing blogger wishes he’d written. Author Jeffrey Cardena’s  account of his solitary venture by houseboat in the Marquesas Keys, an atoll sitting 30 miles west of Key West, is as compelling a first person fishing narrative as you’ll read. Cardenas was, and still is, a well-regarded Keys fishing guide, but his words are not confined to that world. He writes without pretense, in a natural voice that perfectly reflects his sheer joy and wonderment from being immersed in this wilderness with tarpon, permit, sharks and even cassiopea.  He limits his descriptions of the actual fly fishing–a very good thing–and when he does talk about it…

McPhee On Pickerel

Posted on February 23rd, 2010

I stopped subscribing to the New Yorker a few years ago, mostly as a time saving measure. My Dad still gets it.  He cuts out articles from newspapers and magazines that I might like and mails them to me, and this week he clipped a New Yorker essay by John McPhee about fly fishing for pickerel. I could read anything by McPhee, even his 700-page opus about geology, but particularly his essays on fishing. Here’s a bit of his description of pickerel: This family–Esocidae–is not popular with aesthetes, with people who torture trout. Put a pickerel in a pond full of trout, and before long all that’s in there is a larger pickerel. There are people who hunt pickerel with shotguns. In Vermont, that…

Subversive Elements in Children’s Literature

Posted on January 4th, 2010

Read a book 6,372 times in a year and minor details creep into your subconscious, fostering questions. How come you don’t say goodnight to the fly fishing rabbit? Why is the rabbit holding the net in mid cast? Why is he fishing for another rabbit? Is the illustrator promoting cannibalism? Pointless research reveals it is shameless self promotion. The fly fishing rabbit painting in Goodnight Moon is from a scene in another book by the author and illustrator, Runaway Bunny. Either way, I need to get out more.

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