Definitely getting swampy around here

In case you hadn’t heard, the upcoming (January 2024) Key West Literary Seminar will focus on Florida. And we have one hell of a lineup so it’s worth booking now. Hard to believe we were all trying to stay warm at the last one, with the “feels like” temperatures reaching the triple digits around here even before we officially reached summer.

On a recent roadtrip, my husband Mark and I did some prep by listening to Dave Barry’s new novel, Swamp Story. If you read and liked Big Trouble - or even just watched the excellent movie adaptation of it - this is one well worth a read. Or a listen - Dave reads it himself and does a fantastic job. It’s Florida absurdity in the best Elmore Leonard-Carl Hiaasen spirit and because it’s Dave Barry it’s funny as hell. He’s so funny he won a freaking Pulitzer, and I’ve always loved his work best when he’s taking a swipe at something serious. My all-time favorite of his columns was when he covered the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and he was good enough to keep that one on his website because God knows it would take Indiana Jones to unearth it from the Herald archives. In the new book, there is some nice, subtle shade thrown at the New York Times and its climate change reporting which doesn’t sound all that funny but it is. It really, really is.

This is an especially good book to listen to if you’re doing a Florida roadtrip, which we were - we even drove back on Tamiami Trail, where much of the action takes place, so that was a fun meta-moment. It’s so good that I enjoyed it even though I was experiencing a migraine. Really! It helped that Mark was driving and I could just shut my eyes to avoid the light and motion and whatever else was setting off the evil pulsing in my brain. But this story was definitely a helpful distraction. Thank you, Dave, and see you in January.

Florida is TOO a literary place!

Sure we're better known for Disney World, South Beach and real estate swindles but Florida has a rich and continuing literary heritage, dammit -- and in today's Miami Herald my friend and occasional editor Connie Ogle provides a list of her picks for the best. The only change I'd make is to add "The Truth About Lorin Jones" by Alison Lurie -- always my recommendation for a Key West novel, if anyone asks me. And if you want to read one book to get a pretty good sense of Florida history -- especially South Florida -- you can't beat "The Swamp" by Michael Grunwald.

You can go home again -- but should you?

I'm home again -- in western Massachusetts, where I grew up -- and I recently went home to the Miami Herald, with a book review in Sunday's paper. The book, called The Lizard King, is a great read -- lots of South Florida weirdness, in a telling that's appreciative without being over the top. It's the same kind of stuff that Carl Hiaasen and many others write about in fiction; I find it more compelling when you realize these people are real and these crazy capers actually happened. The book got a good review from Janet Maslin in today's New York Times, too. BTW, the famous Tom Wolfe phrase from the subject line of this blog post? Turns out he didn't make it up -- he got it from Lincoln Steffens' widow, to whom he was describing his novel in progress. But he asked her permission to use it, so we'll keep him off the list of literary no-goods for now. I learned that from an interesting book we recently added to the collection at the FKCC library -- called "Nice Guys Finish Seventh," about quotes and phrases that have been misquoted through history. The title of that is closer to the original of Leo Durocher's actual phrase, which was apparently "The nice guys are all over there -- in seventh place." Which I think is better than "nice guys finish last" but admittedly not as pithy.