Reading progress update: I've read 55 out of 295 pages.

1:48 pm 23 September 2014

Well Read, Then Dead - Terrie Farley Moran

I don't usually post these updates but a couple of things I don't want to forget for later:

Being a fourth-generation native Floridian from around the same area of the book's setting, I think I take offence to the author's characterisation of old-timer/native Miss Augusta's "native" speech patterns:

"We been here more’n a hundred years.” She pointed to Miss Delia and let her index finger snap back and forth between them. “Our families come when the Florida Everglades and Islands was the only frontier left in these United States. And we still own the family land. As to wreckers, we got salvage maps older than me. Didn’t need no wrecker permit to hunt treasure years ago. Grampas did what they did.”

My grandfather and his family were amongst the very first to settle in this part of SW Florida, commercial fishermen and loggers all of them, including my daddy until WWII. And I'm QUITE certain they could string sentences together without sounding like illiterates. This Miss Augusta character is supposed to be a pillar of the community and deeply involved in a book club discussing the merits of Green Darkness vs. Rebecca and she talks like this? Please.

Also on a different note:

She and Ryan were eating Miguel's mega-aromatic Old Man and the Sea Chowder. Think red pepper flakes, onion and tarragon slathered on the planks of a fishing pier.

What does that mean!?!?!