Peachy Reads

Craig Taylor took years gathering interviews from all sorts of Londoners to create the impossible-- a comprehensive picture of this multifaceted metropolis provided by its inhabitants. Well, if he didn’t get every representative voice from London, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Included in this book are interviews with the voice of the London Underground (“mind the gap”), taxi drivers, tourists, a beefeater and his wife, protester, angler, rapper, paramedic, estate agent, foreign worker, bouncer, squatter, etc. Their candid commentary shows London, warts and all. Taylor goes far off the beaten tourist trails where the gritty side of London starts to show, providing a picture of London some may be unfamiliar with, but in so doing creating a book that any Londonophile needs to read.

Oversized billboards on Florida’s byways beckon tourists to Swamplandia!, an Everglades sideshow that features the Bigtree family wrestling and swimming with ‘gators (they call them Seths) in a nostalgic tourist trap that most readers will recognize. After opening with a hugely engaging first chapter that introduces the quirky members of the Bigtree Family and their unusual business, it all goes quickly to pieces—Hilola Bigtree, the show’s headliner and family matriarch, succumbs to cancer, the “chief” disappears to the mainland, and the home-schooled children are left more or less to their own devices to fend for themselves. Ossie starts dabbling in the occult and hooks up with a ghostly paramour (whose backstory is somewhat superfluously told in significant detail), Kiwi defects to the rival amusement park, and Ava hooks up with an unsavory swamp character she employs in an attempt to bring her sister back from the “other side.” This novel was noted as one of the ten best books of 20...