Reading Road Trip ... Florida

Florida...long before Portland, Oregon embraced the mantle of weird, Florida seemed to be the source of all the weird news. For me Florida means the Space Coast and the home owned by my parents' friends, Les and Mary Gross, Miami Vice, and Disney World.

I'm not a fan of the Disney brand and I share that opinion with my favorite Florida-based writer, Carl Hiaasen. I've been a fan since Tourist Season (after living in Honolulu for a year, I'm not that fond of tourists) and particularly loved Native Tongue.  I also highly recommend the fantastical novel Swamplandia, tom Dorsey's Florida Roadkill, which I picked up because of the flamingo on the cover. (Flamingos say "Florida" to me, whether it's the actual birds of plastic pink flamingos in a trailer park.)

Other great books set in Florida include Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch,  Jennine Capo Crucet's collection of short stories, How to Leave Hialeah, Charles Willeford's Miami Blues, Joan Didion's Miami, and Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie.


I know that everybody always mentions The Yearling in lists of books set in Florida, but I never read that. Nor did I ever read Where the Red Fern Grows. I read enough sad animal stories as a kid to last me a lifetime. Old Yeller???? I bawled for days. And I wasn't the only one. My grandfather had to kill a dog when he turned on my father and it put my dad off pets for life.

Knit Your Own Cat!

You know, my sister knew how to knit and crochet but that gene just skipped a generation with me. On the rare occasions I sit down to watch television, I don't feel the need to keep my fingers occupied with knitting needles because they're usually busy conveying food to my mouth.
I'm also not really a whimsical person. Yes, I once bought a cement Statue of Liberty for the garden in back of the house I was living in (it was taller than I was and awesome), but it's not like I inflicted my whimsy on passersby, the way I would have if I'd put out a pair of pink flamingos for example.
And yet, when I saw this book, i found myself wishing that I could actually knit because this is the kind of whimsy that tickles my fancy.  (I actually thought it was going to turn out to be a self-help book or something, like the screenwriting manual Save the Cat.)
Knit Your Own Cat. Own the whimsy.