What are you reading in 2025?

Carl Hiaasen's Fever Beach is his best novel in years, maybe a decade. Five stars.

Onto my re-read of Pratchett's Going Postal. Also reading The Mountain in the Sea, which is amazing.

EDIT: Looking over his bibliography, I'd say it's Hiaasen's best book since at least Star Island in 2010. But I think there's an argument to be made that it's his best since Native Tongue in 1991. Fever Beach is really good.
 
Last edited:

log in or register to remove this ad

Carl Hiaasen's Fever Beach is his best novel in years, maybe a decade. Five stars.

Onto my re-read of Pratchett's Going Postal. Also reading The Mountain in the Sea, which is amazing.

EDIT: Looking over his bibliography, I'd say it's Hiaasen's best book since at least Star Island in 2010. But I think there's an argument to be made that it's his best since Native Tongue in 1991. Fever Beach is really good.
Well, that's going on my list to look for. Dunno that I'll buy a copy, but I might--I've been grabbing Hiaasen's novels from the library as I've come across ones I at least don't remember reading. I remember his early books being really good, and some of his most recent ones have been, but I remember a sense that there was a middle period that wasn't so good. (Though "wasn't so good" is relative, and even those middle books might well be plenty enjoyable.)
 

Well, that's going on my list to look for. Dunno that I'll buy a copy, but I might--I've been grabbing Hiaasen's novels from the library as I've come across ones I at least don't remember reading. I remember his early books being really good, and some of his most recent ones have been, but I remember a sense that there was a middle period that wasn't so good. (Though "wasn't so good" is relative, and even those middle books might well be plenty enjoyable.)
I think him retiring from the Miami Herald and no longer being face down in news of corruption and Florida Man nonsense took away a lot of his edge in his middle period. None of his recent books, as commercially successful as they may have been, have anything like Tourist Season's murder of a tourist by choking them to death with a rubber alligator.

Current national politics has him back and swinging his straight razor around again. (If you read his social media accounts, you can see his engagement rising at the same time as his wit starts sharpening again.)
 
Last edited:

I think him retiring from the Miami Herald and no longer being face down in news of corruption and Florida Man nonsense took away a lot of his edge in his middle period. None of his recent books, as commercially successful as they may have been, have anything like Tourist Season's murder of a tourist by choking them to death with a rubber alligator.

Current national politics has him back and swinging his straight razor around again. (If you read his social media account, you can see his engagement rising at the same time as his wit starts sharpening again.)
Stephen King is like that, to me at least. His best stuff was early on when he was hungry, drunk, or coked up. It's his later, more recent stuff that's seemingly turned to mush.
 

Finished reading Mona Lisa Overdrive. It boggles my mind that back in the day I read the first two books and never got to the third. It ties the whole Sprawl Trilogy together, while leaving some tantalizing questions for readers to ponder.

Now I'm dipping back into fantasy with Lin Carter's Thongor Against the Gods. What a classic Frazetta cover!
 

I just finished reading Unmasking Autism, by Dr. Devon Price, and came away from it impressed, though with a few reservations.

As far as understanding autism goes, this book does an excellent job of explaining the condition in a way that's more focused on what it means (or perhaps I should say "how it feels") to live with autism, rather than trying to explain it in any clinical manner. Being autistic, Price speaks from a place of experience here, and it lends a powerful sense of authenticity to their work. It's not just a question of conditions and particular behaviors (though there's excellent coverage of those too, including things like how many autistic people have senses that are more sensitive to stimuli than "allistic" people (the term for non-autistic people) and the meaning behind frequent "stimming" activities), but also of how it feels to try and conform to a neurotypical society (in a word: unpleasant).

In this regard, "unmasking" is essentially being your authentic, autistic self, without fear or shame.

Of course, Price recognizes that this is not only difficult for many people, but can be even harder (and possibly dangerous) if you're part of multiple minorities. While being autistic while black, queer, a woman, etc. are all given some coverage in this regard, I should note that the book only touches on these in limited ways, simply because they occupy a subset of what Price talks about. Still, it's an important point of coverage which warrants acknowledgment.

While I think this book hits far more than it misses, there were a few points where I was less enthusiastic about its take on things. This was largely where informing and educating gave way to advocacy, particularly with regards to the systemic changes that Price says that society needs to make for the benefit of autistic people. Even if we leave aside that many of these changes have far-reaching effects beyond that of the autistic community (e.g. a universal basic income), some of them seem to be not only unfeasible, but undesirable.

For instance, at one point Price talks about making public spaces (e.g. municipal buildings, public parks, buses and subways, etc.) more friendly to neurodiverse people by cutting back on their sensory stimulation. While I can see this for things like having dimmer lights in public buildings (though I worry about the effect that might have on people with vision problems), Price also advocates for quieter public spaces, and even excluding strong smells, and that's where I have to object, because that sounds like ejecting someone from a public park for playing their radio out loud or being kicked off the subway because their perfume/cologne is too strong (with excessive perfume and cologne being specifically cited as problems to be managed). It's the difference between "freedom to" rights versus "freedom from" rights, and crossing from one to the other is a very, very charged point, one which risks making the perfect the enemy of the good (among other issues).

Likewise, I was uncomfortable with the repeated instances of the idea of "I deserve to be accommodated (simply because of who I am)." Not because I disagree with the sentiment (quite the contrary), but because the line between refusing to be disenfranchised and expecting/demanding that other people to cater to you (i.e. being entitled) isn't a line at all, but a continuum. At the risk of making this more about me than about the book, I think there's at least some virtue in the idea of not troubling others for your own benefit, and that even if it's unpleasant there's still merit to conforming when in public and professional spaces. (Of course, as with all things, there's a great degree of nuance to these ideas, and everyone will embrace or reject them in different degrees.)

But those are minor nitpicks overall, and the presentation of what it means to live with autism and the damage that is done by trying to repress that in order to fit in is impressive enough that I can't hold the above points of disagreement against the book (not that I would anyway, since I'm of the opinion that disagreement, when presented and discussed rationally and respectfully, is a good thing). To that end, I'd heartily recommend this to anyone who wants to understand the autistic community better.
 

I just finished reading Washington Irving's Tales of the Supernatural, a 1982 collection of some of the eponymous author's short stories, and enjoyed it quite a bit!

I'll admit that I knew very little about Irving prior to this, mostly by way of knowing his two most popular tales: "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (though I'm sure I read "The Devil and Tom Walker" at some point also). However, I was surprised to learn (from this book's introduction, written by Edward Wagenknecht) that not only did Irving travel a great deal and have a storied political career, but he also wrote numerous other short stories (many of which, after a stint in Spain, were set in and around the Alhambra).

What's in this book, then, is a selection of Irving's work, though I confess to being somewhat unclear regarding the criteria for why certain stories were chosen over others. While all of his most famous stories are here (i.e. the three I mentioned previously), along with a few others from Irving's infamous Diedrich Knickerbocker hoax (which is where the New York Knicks would eventually get their name), there's a large contingent of his Alhambra stories, as well as a scattering of tales set in Germany. Amusingly enough, at least one of the stories here has nothing to do with the supernatural at all, making me wonder what the compiler was thinking.

But issues of thematic cohesion aside, there's a lot to enjoy in these classic old tales. Irving's writing has been preserved as-is, so there were quite a few times when I had to look up some old word (and occasionally a Dutch term) that casually appeared in a sentence, along with quite a few Spanish references when it came to the Alhambra tales (I'd never heard of Bernardo del Carpio, for instance), which was often an unexpected bonus as it led me down some interesting new tangent.

Collections like this are why I continually find myself drawn to older works rather than newer ones.
 

My reading is about to get entertainingly messy. I make a lot of use of the Audible Plus catalog of books free for subscribers. Books don’t stay in the catalog forever, though, and a bunch I’ve picked up are going to expire in the next few weeks. I wanna see how many of them I can listen to in time. :) So…fantasy, Roman history, the Pacific front of World War II, and some fantasy. Chaos ho!
 

My reading is about to get entertainingly messy. I make a lot of use of the Audible Plus catalog of books free for subscribers. Books don’t stay in the catalog forever, though, and a bunch I’ve picked up are going to expire in the next few weeks. I wanna see how many of them I can listen to in time. :) So…fantasy, Roman history, the Pacific front of World War II, and some fantasy. Chaos ho!
I should start making a point to find nonfiction to read, at some point. Of course, by the time I finish browsing the fiction I usually have ten or twelve books to tote around ...
 

I should start making a point to find nonfiction to read, at some point. Of course, by the time I finish browsing the fiction I usually have ten or twelve books to tote around ...
I should be clear, this is on my fortnightly-ish trips to the local library of my choice. I don't go shopping for books often enough anymore to have an established pattern.
 

Pets & Sidekicks

Remove ads

Top