Book yourself a winter escape
Midwinter is a glorious time to read books. With short days and long nights, and tucked up beside a roaring fire, there is nothing better than letting the imagination run wild and being drawn into another world through reading printed pieces of paper.
My own love of reading probably didn’t kick in until late at high school at Waimea College. Bob Hart’s sixth form history class in the early ’80s really fired me up about reading historical books, and one thing I always found amusing at the time was a history reviewer rightfully describing Adolf Hitler’s hateful tome Mein Kampf as the ‘‘half-baked output of a third-rate mind’’.
So some books are good and some are bad, but in the end it is always in the eye of the beholder or reader.
Books are filtered and crafted by the author, generally having considerable thought and talent behind them, as opposed to some of the unfiltered and plagiarised rubbish emanating on the internet and social media these days. For these reasons, I don’t believe quality paper-based books will ever go out of style.
Reading is also good for the mind, being similar to what exercise is to the body.
One online article by Lana Winter-Hebert listed many good reasons for reading a physical book, and these include mental stimulation, stress reduction, knowledge, vocabulary expansion, memory improvement, stronger analytical thinking skills, improved focus and concentration, better writing skills, tranquillity, and entertainment.
Everyone reads for different reasons, and I once questioned my wife Aimee on why she continued to read fantastical romantic paperback novels. She gave me a great answer: ‘‘You read to learn, but I read to escape.’’
Fly fishing books have always been my escape, and I have been fortunate to have amassed a great collection over my lifetime. I have lots of hunting, outdoor and saltwater fishing books, too, but these fly fishing books are among my most treasured possessions.
The late Bryn Hammond once described fly fishing as ‘‘arcane and esoteric to the uninitiated’’, which is absolutely true, but there have been more books written about fly fishing than perhaps any other topic.
Fly fishers are addicts to their own sport, members of a cult, who speak almost another language whether describing technical aspects or detailing the sheer poetry of the pursuit and the beautiful places that trout inhabit.
My personal fly fishing journey has taken me around the world to fish and guide, and I have been fortunate to have met and fished with some of the modern gurus of the sport. I even own many of their books, and carry in my mind many of their insights and observations that I have gained through reading and study. Some of these books are even autographed by my heroes, inscribed with personal messages that I cherish.
It’s good for the soul, but you can never own too many books.
Lately, I was relocating bookcases into my downstairs office, even picking through which ones to keep and what to shed. It was a big job, and took even longer as I stopped to flick through many of these epic tomes as I worked. I also added some inherited books, as yet unread, given to me by friends and acquaintances, and also some new old books obtained at the recent Founders Book Fair.
Held every year at Queen’s Birthday weekend, the fair is a nine-day pre-loved book extravaganza, accessible to all for the price of a gold coin donation. There are some great bargains to be had, with many books only of real value to the purchaser.
Alas, I never made it to the opening day, arriving on day four to a heavily picked-over selection of fishing and hunting books – but it was still a gold mine.
For about $17 I picked up some real classics, including Nymphing: A Basic Book, a humbly titled 1979 epic by American Gary Borger, who I once met at Bob Haswell’s Lake Rotoroa Lodge many moons ago.
Borger and his book heavily influenced one of my local fishing and guiding mentors, Tony Entwistle, and in turn influenced how we all fish the South Island today, with the concepts of strike indicators, long tippets (fine terminal traces), and ‘‘shotgunning’’ riffles. Best of all, my copy purchased at Founders for $1 once belonged to the late R M (Rob) Maling, former mayor of Richmond Borough, and father of my friend Kit Maling, current Tasman district councillor.
I was so excited about my haul that I went back a few days later to check out more pre-loved outdoor books, this time walking away with more classics worth about $40, including a mint condition 1974 copy of Trout with Nymph by Marlborough’s Tony Orman.
One thing is for sure – I have plenty of reading to occupy the long, cold winter nights, and to learn and dream of new strategies in the river and on the hills over the warmer months ahead.
Best of all, it’s possible to read multiple books at the same time, of different genres and topics. Lately, apart from fishing books, I’ve been finishing off extensive reading about the life and times of Genghis Khan; re-reading Bulletproof Your Business by Cantabrian Craig Rust, and enjoying Kiwi singing sensation Sir John Rowles’s cleverly titled autobiography IfI Only Had Time.
I’m also riveted to my bedtime chapter of an English translation of Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel ,an incredibly insightful record of one German soldier’s experiences in the trenches of the World War I European battlefields. What seems amazing to me is that Junger and my grandfather, Ash Mirfin, could well have been shooting at each other across the mud, barbed wire, gas fumes and no-man’s-land.
Reading will never go out of style, whatever you may read or study. The potential is unlimited, and you can explore the world without ever leaving the comfort of your sofa.
Reading can even take over from the active pursuit of fishing and hunting during winter. So I can sadly report that no animals or fish were harvested and eaten in the production of this week’s column.