Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West

"Angling is, ultimately, a cultural activity. And a complicated one at that. The way people fish, the tackle they choose, the clothes they wear, the species they target, the way they think and write about this activity: it’s all, to a very large extent, culturally determined. In Britain, angling was for a long time divided along class lines. Upper-class people fished for salmon, sometimes trout; working-class people fished for other species, known as ‘coarse’ fish. These divisions have evolved, but the lines remain. The various angling cultures of Britain are still weirdly distinct from one another. In the US, the contemporary image of an angler is tied to colonial notions of the ‘frontier’ and the unspoiled American wilderness. The West, in other words. That’s what we see in A River Runs Through It , for instance—the individual dominated by land and water—and it’s a really beguiling idea. Jen Corrine Brown takes a hard look at that image, and she exposes the contradictions and the falsehoods that it rests on. ‘Wild’ angling in the American West often means fishing in waters that have been emptied—or at the very least depleted—of native fish, catching species such as brown trout, which were brought to America from Germany and Scotland, and which have been reared in hatcheries, then stocked for anglers’ entertainment. There’s nothing very wild about it, in truth. Brown isn’t by any means anti-fishing, she’s just interested in thinking clearly about the ways in which anglers portray themselves and their sport. She wants to show the culture for what it really is, and it’s a fascinating read. And of course, who fishes is also a cultural question, and the fact that this is the only book on my list by a woman is a reflection of just how male-dominated angling, and angling writing, has traditionally been. That, at least, is beginning to change, thank goodness!"