Never Sniff a Gift Fish

Here is a collection of comic tales of the outdoorsman.  Idaho native Patrick F. McManus offers a variety of accounts of his misadventures as a child, an adolescent, an adult, and a father.  There is a recurring cast of characters with unlikely names: Retch Sweeny, Rancid Crabtree, Crazy Eddie, and Fenton Quagmire among them.  Each tale offers the sagely advice of an experienced woodsman, hunter, fisherman, horseman, and so forth.  However, it quickly becomes clear that the narrator is far from skilled and much of the tale demonstrates his incompetence, cluelessness, or both.  Often, he sets up a scene with a predictable outcome and then subverts expectations.  On a date, he invites a girl to the back seat of the car and then asks if she's okay back there.  He explains how his fishing buddy lost a watch in a river and then, when cutting open a fish years later, found a bottle cap.  The stories are randomly sorted so that in one he tells of his efforts to ride a cow when he was 8 or so, and the next will have him tell of his 40 years of fishing with temporary measures that have been in place for most of that time.  The stories are brief and funny.  There is no overarching plot, just a collection of short tales of an outdoorsman.

This was loaned to me by a co-worker.  It would not be my normal fare, but it was enjoyable.  However, not so entertaining that I'll seek out his other books.