On Oct 26, 12:47*pm, "JT" wrote:
For the last several years my bride has given me a book for Christmas,
something I have enjoyed a great deal.

Are there any books that you would suggest?

It doesn't necessarily have to be fishing/flyfishing related. *In past years
I have read "The Ridge Runner" , "North to the Night", "Working on the Edge"
and could hardly put them down...

TIA,
JT

Whew! Book recommendations......this one always gives me the
fantods. Where to begin? Where to end?

Well, let's start with something that IS fishing related. Robert
Traver's (Traver was the nom de plume of judge John Voelker) "Trout
Madness" is still hard to beat after all these decades for
encapsulating what the title alone says so eloquently.

If you're a book lover (not every reader.....not even every avid
reader.....is), Hans Zinsser's "Rats, Lice and History" is a must.
So, what's to like about a 1930's vintage introduction to
epidemiology? The subtitle; "Being a Study in Biography, Which, After
Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the
Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever" gives some
subtle clues. Zinsser was playful, garrulous, opinionated, well
educated (a highly respected epidemiologist), as well as an
extraordinarily good writer. Digression, rants, digressions, cool
logic, digressions, wit, digressions, historical perspective,
digressions, a keen sense of the absurd in contemporary culture and
politics (in its time, of course) and digressions.....this book has
got it all. This was the first first and only book I have ever read
that made me laugh out loud on reading a footnote.....and has made me
do so again on each of a dozen or so rereadings over the last forty
years.

But enough editorialising.....a few other favorites, in no particular
order and sans (mostly) commentary (Google can find you billions and
billions of better reviews than anything I could ever hope to
provide):

"Metamagical Themas"--Douglas Hofstadter.
"The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat"--Oliver Sacks
any of Stephen J. Gould's books.
"West With the Night"--Beryl Markham
"Don Quixote"--Miguel de Cervantes. (Considered by many to be the
first true "novel"......you'll have to ask them about the
criteria.....and by many to be the best ever.....ibid. Bottom line;
Cervantes got it right the first time). But be careful about the
translation you pick (unless you decide to read it in the
original).....some are very dreary.
"Huckleberry Finn" by you know who, IS the quintessential "great
american novel" despite being commonly (and egregiously) libeled as a
children's book. (An old friend of mine, who took too many postgrad
lit courses, once told me that the book is "episodic"! No, duh.)
Pretty much anything by Barbara Kingsolver, but especially "The Bean
Trees," "Pigs in Heaven," and "Animal Dreams."
Anything by Annie Dillard.

Um......uh.....well, one could go on for days.

More?

giles