Those Were The Days

by Archibald Rutledge

Nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature In this nostalgic classic, Archibald Rutledge commemorates the Christmas Day deer hunts and articulates his passion for hunting, white-tailed deer, and the outdoors. An insightful read.

480 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2005

About the author

Archibald Hamilton Rutledge (1883-1973) was a South Carolina poet laureate. He is remembered as one of America's best-loved outdoor writers. His short stories appeared in Outdoor Life and Field and Stream, plus he wrote more than 50 books including An American Hunter (1937), Old Plantation Days (1907) and Wild Life of the South (1935).

Reviews

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️ Wanted to like this one more than I did, and honestly I may have had the book been 1/3 of the length it was!

I dog-eared a few pages for their memorable and relatable quotes about sporting life, but those tapered off after about 250 pages. This book absolutely did not have to be as long as it is- there were some good stories and some less enjoyable (to be expected with a collection of multiple writings like this, regardless of number of authors) but it felt like we were reaching by that 250 page mark. There were multiple repeats and mentions of stories and dialogues (“a deer gwine where it gwine” which, what?, how otters swim, turkeys alleged inability to fly certain distances due to size and overheating, etc) and some of the passages just felt too fluffy and overdrawn with unnecessary details and descriptions that didn’t land half the time because it didn’t make sense.

Now I’m all for descriptions that take the reader “there”, and recounting past happenstances literally and figuratively in order to make the impact, or drive a point. I’m even guilty of repetition of my deliveries within different stories because doing so was effective and authentic. But in this case, the repetition’s felt like a lazy attempt to save space and reuse brain power from another story, and didn’t add anything extra. This made for a long, boring read by that halfway mark and beyond, as everything felt flat and lacked depth.

And I was confused by the last story, which was arguably more entertaining than majority of the last 30% of the book by far…but it’s obviously fiction (along with the story about Bolio the hound) and I’m wondering how this was at all relative to the entity of the book: which was a collection of Archibald’s stories recounting his very non-fictitious life in the outdoors? It wouldn’t have felt so ‘off’ if we were clear in the beginning these stories were just a mixed bag of fictions and nonfictions, but having two nonfictions right at the end after reading for 350+ pages about real events and lessons and histories added to the feel of “let’s just start adding things to make this book longer”.