Latest fishing reading

With just a few weeks to go to the new season, I am doing a spot of pre-season, fishing-related reading.  For the last couple of days, I have been reading John Wilson's account of his fishing in 1990.  Years ago, when I had only been fishing for a year or two, my parents bought me John Wilson's A Specimen Fishing Year.  This remains one of my all-time favourite fishing books and was the main reason I started a fishing diary back in the mid-late 1970s.  Go Fishing Year is in the same style but his fishing now has a huge international bias to it, related to the TV shows.  I was hoping to glean some valuable fishing-programme-making tips, but it seems that the main lesson is that the teams that make the TV shows are actually quite large - 5 or 6 people - and that each show takes several days to make.  But the info about filler and continuity shots was interesting and is exactly the sort of stuff I am thinking about lots at the moment.  Really nice photos too.

I bought Targets set and Achieved directly from Phil a few months back.  I am a big fan of his fishing blog and the book very much follows the same format as the blog.  The individual entries are all very interesting and I have been thinking alot about some of the points made.  So overall, I rather like the book.  My one and only gripe is actually the whole "targets" approach.  I don't think the fishing stories are enhanced particularly by this overall theme - they stand up themselves without it.  And it does lead to the unfortunate feature that once the target is caught, that's it, its off to another place. 

This book is a self-published affair and interesting because of this.  A fair few typos and some odd phrasing here and there, but actually a really good effort more or less on his own.

Next up will be Chris Yates' The Deepening Pool, then maybe Miles and West's Quest for Barbel, both older books from my collection - and I want to read the 60 back issues of Course Angling Today that I acquired over the winter.