The idea that I could do all this fishing and reading, plus my normal activities of daily living, and then blog in detail about every angling trip or book was always pretty unrealistic, and so it has proved. So, I think I'm just going to do an update blog post here covering several books and fishing trips in one go. Maybe I'll do a couple of in-depth book reviews later on if I can catch up.
Here's the latest spreadsheet on the 2023 fishing challenge (10 species caught to date):
and here's where the 2023 reading has reached (11 books read to date):
For book 3, another Christmas pressie was sitting in the queue by the side of my bed, the first novel by a crime writer whose work I had never read before: Craig Johnson. Johnson's addition to the jaded lawman genre is Walt Longmire, sheriff of the fictional Absaroka County in Northern Wyoming. The Cold Dish, a tale of revenge of course, is the first Longmire novel; Wikipedia tells me that, as of 2022, there are 24 books in the series.
This is a perfectly enjoyable read. It follows several well-worn paths: the maverick ageing lawman; his character forged by a military background (Vietnam in this case since the novel was published in 2004 and is set a few years earlier); his softer artistic side (he reads poetry and plays the piano); and his unhappiness/unluckiness in love after his wife has died. For British readers you can think Morse (or Adam Dalgleish) but with rifles, horses and pickups.
There are a couple of points of difference in this novel which stand out from typical crime fiction. First, there is a focus on the treatment of native American peoples, specifically the Cheyenne. It is a central part of this novel's plot and creates a potential motive for the murders. Secondly, there is the epic setting in the remote landscapes of Northern Wyoming -- although I learned with some disappointment that the really excellent TV adapations of the Longmire books were not filmed in situ. I think these two features were likely to have been an influence on the subsequent and hugely popular Yellowstone TV series, set just across the border in Montana. These aspects are big pluses and serve, in this book, to make a potentially curious semi-trance sequence, where Longmire is guided by native American spirits to help him track a fugitive in the snowy wilderness, seem kind of normal. I probably should re-read that section to be sure I understood it correctly.
This book was followed by a trip to the River Mole locally, which was in good condition for fishing. I set out on 31st January to try for species #3. The main fish I catch on that river are chub, pike and, less often, barbel. I will need all three in 2023 to complete my challenge. Frustratingly, I didn't catch anything in three hours or so that afternoon. I was so annoyed that I hatched a plan to return the next day to try again. I caught a couple of pike including this one:
And with the last cast as the light faded, I landed this nice chunky chub:
I nominated the chub as species #3.
Book 4 was Russ Jones' A Decade in Tory. This is a non-fiction political polemic that charts the first 10 years of Tory government in the UK starting in 2010. Spoiler alert: it wasn't great (the decade, not the book). This fat tome arose from @RussInCheshire's much-loved weekly twitter series: The Week in Tory. Click here for the most recent week's worth of bitter laughs.
This book made me laugh, feel angry and sad on almost every page. It charts the catastrophic series of goverments since David Cameron was propped up by his Liberal Democrat patsies in 2010. It of course covers the Brexit fiascoes from 2016 onwards, the short-lived goverment of the the MayBot (propped up by the Democratic Unionists), right up to the final glorious leader of the decade (propped up by his rich friends and cronies). It is over 500 pages but I read it over two sometimes side-splitting and often tear-inducing days. It probably isn't going to appeal to people of all political persuasions but it is a useful record of a decade that makes the Thatcherite politics of my late teems and 20s seem principled and organised.
The behaviour of then more osbcure and now familiar Tory MPs is charted in great detail, year by year. Here's some typical Jones one-line pen portriats of the MPs who were prominent members of Vote Leave: "the viciously polite ventriloquist's doll Michael Gove ... Steve Baker, last seen urging a brawny man to beat him senseless by the bins .. Iain Duncan-Smith dragging his sepulchral corpse from studio to studio ...Priti Patel the smirking razor-faced angel of death ... the bellowing Oompa-Loompa Mark Francois .. the bellend's bellend Chris Grayling. And finally: Andrea Leadsom who, in a crowded field, was reported to be described by civil servants who worked with her as 'the worst minister ever'." The misdeeds of these miscreants -- and many others -- are forever recorded. Lest we forget.
One thing I noted is that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng don't get much of a mention. However, the book ends in December 2020, and those two more than made up for it after that. In fact, Jones has a follow-up book "Four Chancellors and a Funeral" about the chaotic craziness of the UK government in 2021-2022.
Having completed book #4 I wanted to do some more local river fishing for species #4. February is a good month for pike and even though I had caught 2 pike when trying for species number 3 (see above) I decided a pike would be a good target for the next species.
My younger brother Ian had stopped fishing for several decades, in the same way that I had. After getting the angling bug again myself, I have been trying recently to reignite the passion in him. On a trip in 2022 he had told me that he had never caught a pike, the UK's largest native predatory species. This seemed like a perfect convergence: we were going to try to get him to cacth his first pike on the next trip, scheduled for Feb 17th.
This trip was a great success: Ian did indeed catch his first pike.
He caught several others too, as well as his first chub: a fat whopper weighing just over 5 lbs.
I caught a couple of pike too so I had species #4.
The 5th book was another Xmas present: Rutherford and Fry's Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything. This is a quirky science education book modelled on their popular radio series / podcasts: The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry.
Adam Rutherford is a geneticist and science writer. I reviewed his book about Eugenics -- "Control" -- as my first book of the year (see here). Hannah Fry is an applied mathematician who, like Rutherford, is dedicated to popularising and explaining science. Her recent TV documentary about her cancer diagnosis and treatment decisions was educational, uplifting and moving. Anyone who has listened to the Rutherford and Fry podcasts knows they are mates and they try to make their investigations of "big" science questions entertaining as well as informative. Fry's laugh is, for me, one of the delights you can hear on the UK's Radio 4. This book strives for the same goals. For me it mostly suceeded, although the pot pourri of topics it covers varied in my levels of intrinsic interest and prior familiarity.
The topic I found most mind-blowing was the description of Jonathan Basile's digital library of Babel: an archive that allows one to access every possible sentence you can dream up (as long as it is under 3200 characters). How can that be possible? Let's test it out with a sentence from earlier in this posting: "My younger brother Ian had stopped fishing for several decades, in the same way that I had."
The above sentence is easily found in the library using the search facility. I bookmarked it so it can be retreived quickly: here
A hexagonal room in the library which holds a book containing this sentence is identified by a long "hex name" (which can be downloaded from a text file that I saved here). You can paste this "hex name" code into the browse function of the library (here). This will find the right room of the library and then the book is on wall 1 shelf 5 of the room, and it is the 32nd volume on that shelf. As if by magic, page 95 of that book contains the exact sentence including spaces, commas and full stops, and nothing else. The genius of this obviously lies in the unique coding that enables each book in the library (and its pages) to correspond to every input string that one might enter as a search term into the library. I can't conceive in any detail how this is done (a very brief sketch is given by Rutherford and Fry).
After completing book 5 we went to our house in France for a short spring break in March. I was able to go fishing on the River Thouet, which is a major tributary of the Loire. The river runs through the town where our house is located; in fact it runs past the end of our garden. I caught only 2 fish: a small roach and a huge rudd. Well it was huge for me, being about twice the size of the largest one I had ever caught before. It weighed 2lbs; i.e., about half the size of the British record. The 6-inch forceps in the picture below are included for scale.
I'll blog again soon about the next few books and fishing trips. My blogging is still miles behind 🙁🙁. Right now I'm off to try to catch species number 11.
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