If you like books about obsession, you would like The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean. You might better recognize it as the film "Adaptation." It's a story about the orchid subculture in Florida and one guy who's fixated on finding the elusive ghost orchid in the Fakahatchee swamp.
It's amazing that Florida has so many idiosyncracies that authors can continue to exploit them. John D. MacDonald did it from the 1950s through the 1980s, Carl Hiaasen has been doing it for a while now, and Dave Barry mined them for years for his columns.
This story is amusing, fast-paced, and easily read in an evening.
Posted by Linkmeister at August 8, 2006 03:52 PM | TrackBack