Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 20
A Nature Book Reader
WILL BURNS
Will Burns is a songwriter, singer and poet from Wendover, Buckinghamshire
Trout Fishing In America
by Richard Brautigan
Although I think there are
books that perhaps better
fit the term “nature book”,
I don’t think there is a book
that has communicated
quite so well with my own
personal relationship with
nature and the outdoors.
Brautigan’s breakthrough
novel is a wide-eyed, at times
nonsensical soup of ideas,
occupying a landscape that is
both rugged and wild yet at
the same time domestic and
small and somehow homely.
It is not a book of authority; it
is not a didactic guide to birdwatching, tying flies, building
camps or, in fact, how to
do anything at all. Instead
it simply observes with a
beautiful and hopeful sense of
wonder, the environment and
lucidly drawn characters that
pass through the patchwork
of poem-like chapters that
20
make up the book. From
the recurring thread of AllAmerican creek names to
the brilliant evocation of
life in the San Franciscan
underbelly, this is a brilliantly
imagined, kaleidoscopic
vision of a weird America,
an America made up of trout
rivers for sale in sections
from hardware stores,
young parenthood, fishing,
drinking and travel. Oh
yeah, and mayonnaise.
Further Reading
Klondike Tales
by Jack London
Man Eaters of
Kumaon
by Jim Corbett
