What are you reading in 2026?

[jian]

Blitzed is fascinating, and seems likely to help explain behavior in modern groups like high finance and politics.

It’s also invaluable when you need to know what cocktail of drugs a supervillain organisation would give to someone who has to pilot a kamikaze midget submarine.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I finished up Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen this morning. It's my first Hiaasen, and I did enjoy it -- a brisk read with some nice character work and a strong sense of place. My only real complaint was I wasn't sure how to feel about his efforts to represent Bahamian dialect or the Dragon Queen stuff. For the former, sometimes it felt like it undercut the development of Neville and the other characters on Andros, making them seem cartoonish (also attempts to render the dialect as readable sometimes led me to what I was certain was the wrong accent -- there's no way that Neville should have sounded like a 1930s gangster). The latter, with its detour into voodoo, played with stereotypes in ways that I couldn't really parse. Like, I don't know enough about the Caribbean generally or the Bahamas specifically or the people that live there to decide how I felt about it. Ultimately, my sense was that these were artistic and narrative choices that didn't quite work for me that I don't think were ill intentioned even if they might have been better off reconsidered. Anyhow, a fun read, though I'm not sure if I'll read more of his stuff. Maybe Razor Girl, which has some of the same characters?

 

[prabe]

I finished up Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen this morning. It's my first Hiaasen, and I did enjoy it -- a brisk read with some nice character work and a strong sense of place. My only real complaint was I wasn't sure how to feel about his efforts to represent Bahamian dialect or the Dragon Queen stuff. For the former, sometimes it felt like it undercut the development of Neville and the other characters on Andros, making them seem cartoonish (also attempts to render the dialect as readable sometimes led me to what I was certain was the wrong accent -- there's no way that Neville should have sounded like a 1930s gangster). The latter, with its detour into voodoo, played with stereotypes in ways that I couldn't really parse. Like, I don't know enough about the Caribbean generally or the Bahamas specifically or the people that live there to decide how I felt about it. Ultimately, my sense was that these were artistic and narrative choices that didn't quite work for me that I don't think were ill intentioned even if they might have been better off reconsidered. Anyhow, a fun read, though I'm not sure if I'll read more of his stuff. Maybe Razor Girl, which has some of the same characters?

Razor Girl is hilarious, and doesn't have anything like the same vaguely problematic elements as Bad Monkey. It's plausible there are some characters overlapping--if no one else, Skink seems likely. Squeeze Me and Fever Beach are his most-recent, and they both play at satire more than at least most of his earlier novels, and I can recommend those, as well.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Razor Girl is hilarious, and doesn't have anything like the same vaguely problematic elements as Bad Monkey. It's plausible there are some characters overlapping--if no one else, Skink seems likely. Squeeze Me and Fever Beach are his most-recent, and they both play at satire more than at least most of his earlier novels, and I can recommend those, as well.

Oh, that's good to hear. Neville was a really strong, sympathetic character, so the attempt at dialect really was jarring to me (and it was a little weird that Clasper's final vignette in Colombia let Donna speak in standard English, IIRC).

 

[prabe]

Oh, that's good to hear. Neville was a really strong, sympathetic character, so the attempt at dialect really was jarring to me (and it was a little weird that Clasper's final vignette in Colombia let Donna speak in standard English, IIRC).

Yeah. There's some stuff in Bad Monkey that's probably not super-awesome and won't get better with age--though the POV scenes from the monkey are fricking brilliant, IIRC. Most of the time Hiaasen sticks in Miami, and at least mostly with Anglos (at least as far as whom he makes fun of).

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Yeah. There's some stuff in Bad Monkey that's probably not super-awesome and won't get better with age--though the POV scenes from the monkey are fricking brilliant, IIRC. Most of the time Hiaasen sticks in Miami, and at least mostly with Anglos (at least as far as whom he makes fun of).

The Bonnie subplot had a lot going on.