The Best Fly Fishing Books for Beginners

If you are new to fly fishing, buy the Curtis Creek Manifesto first — a 48-page illustrated guide to fishing small streams — and read Reading the Water second. Those two cover the things that actually catch fish: how to approach a creek without spooking everything in it, and where trout hold in moving water. Everything else is detail you can look up later.

This page is written for a beginner. The cheapest useful start is the Orvis Guide to Beginning Fly Fishing at around ten dollars, and the most complete single how-to is The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Fly Fishing.

The order to read them in

One: a short illustrated book, before your first trip. You want pictures of where to stand and how a fly drifts, not prose about entomology. Curtis Creek does this in an evening and costs less than a box of flies.

Two: a mechanics book, with a rod in your hand.Knots, rigging and the cast are learned by doing them while a diagram is open next to you. That is the Absolute Beginner's Guide, or the relevant pages of the Total Manual. Our own version of the rigging walk-through is how to set up a fly rod.

Three: a water-reading book, after a few trips. Reading the Water makes far more sense once you have stood in a creek and wondered where the fish are. Read it too early and it is abstract; read it after four outings and it rearranges how you see a pool.

Four: a reference, forever. One big illustrated manual on the shelf for looking things up. That is all the library a stream angler needs.

The six books, compared

What a book can teach and what it cannot

Books are excellent at knots, rigs and reading water. All three are pattern-recognition problems with diagrams, and a diagram you can stare at beats a video you have to pause. A beginner who has read one good book arrives at the creek with a rig that works.

Books are poor at the casting stroke. Casting is timing, and timing is learned by feel with somebody watching you — or failing that, with video of yourself. Read the chapter, then spend twenty minutes on a lawn with no fly on the leader.

And no book will tell you what your creek does. The water in front of you has its own hatches, its own holding spots and its own access problems. Books give you the framework; the stretch you fish fills it in.

What to skip as a beginner

Entomology encyclopedias. Hatch-matching books are superb and they are a second or third year purchase. For a first season, three fly patterns in two sizes catch fish in almost any creek in the country — the list is in the best trout flies for beginners.

Fly tying books, until you own a vise. Tying is a separate hobby that happens to overlap with fishing. If it appeals, start with a kit rather than a book — the fly tying kit roundup covers it.

Destination and literary books. They are the pleasure of the sport and they teach you nothing about your creek. Buy them once you are catching fish, not before.

Buying one as a gift

A book is the safest fly fishing gift there is. No sizing, no line weight, no chance of duplicating something they own in a different brand. Curtis Creek is the one to give somebody who has just started, and Reading the Water is the one to give somebody who has fished for a year or two.

Pair it with something physical if you want it to feel like a present. A book plus a landing net or a pair of nippers covers both. The gift pairings are in fishing gift ideas and fly fishing gifts for men.

And if they own no gear at all, buy the gear first. A book is a poor gift for somebody with nothing to practice on — the complete first setup is in the fly fishing starter kit and the gear list is in fly fishing gear for beginners.