Here are 100 books that Orange Crush fans have personally recommended if you like
Orange Crush.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Not so long ago, I got paid to roam Florida and send back quirky dispatches to waiting newspaper editors. I’m fourth-generation, and like many Floridians, I have a love-hate relationship with my home state. I love the exotic beauty, the tumultuous weather, and the “end-of-the-road” mentality of the Sunshine State, but I hate the sprawl, the traffic and the “everything’s for-sale” greed that’s turning this once-pristine place into a steaming suburban parking lot. I enjoy books that capture the beauty, the strangeness, and the quirky characters who still haunt this pistol-shaped peninsula.
Carl was a journalist I got to know during my days roaming the state for The Tampa Tribune and later, the St. Petersburg Times.
A Miami Herald columnist, Carl pretty much invented the modern Florida novel, with his dark and often hilarious first book, Tourist Season. Like many of his other books, this razor-sharp satire is stocked with colorful characters dealing with a state being consumed by greed, corrupt leadership, and overdevelopment.
Take a trip to exotic South Florida with this dark, funny book that established Carl Hiaasen as one of the top mystery writers in the game.
The first sign of trouble is a Shriner's fez washed up on a Miami beach. The next is a suitcase containing the almost-legless body of the local chamber of commerce president found floating in a canal...
The locals are desperate to keep the murders under wraps and the tourist money flowing. But it will take a reporter-turned–private eye to make sense of a caper that mixes football players, politicians, and one very hungry crocodile…
The Everlasting Life of Charlie Wall
by
Paul Wilborn,
It’s 1985, and Ronald Armstrong, known in the magic mushroom trade as “Trip,” takes a “sober” job as a driver for a retired Tampa mobster. His boss, Charlie Wall, has survived four attempts on his life, the last one in 1955. When Charlie falls into depression, Trip rebuilds his boss’…
I am Susie Black. Before I became an award-winning, humorous, cozy mystery author, I had a successful career as a ladies’ swimwear sales exec. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time in Florida. I interacted with progressive, traditional, and conservative buyers and sellers from large cities to small towns all over the Sunshine State. My experiences gave me a unique perspective on the social mores and hierarchy of Florida’s diverse, multi-layered, and complicated society.
I’ve always marched to the beat of my own drum, so naturally, a fish-out-of-water coming-of-age laugh-out-loud comedy replete with a zany cast, spot-on dialog, and an unlikely hero had me from page one.
People go to Key West for different reasons…magnificent sunsets, key lime pie, to commune with the ghost of Hemingway…The unlikely hero of this cleverly plotted book went to Key West to become a gangster. I led the cheers and gave him a zillion attaboys for standing up for himself and not allowing anyone to rain on his parade.
"People go to Key West for lots of different reasons. Joey Goldman went there to become a gangster..." So begins this classic Key West caper, the hilarious and touching book that launched a much-loved series and introduced the world to Bert the Shirt and his chihuahua Don Giovanni, two of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction. Joey, the illegitimate son of a major NY mafioso, decides to break away from a decidedly unpromising future in the old neighborhood of Queens. But will the old neighborhood and the Family let him go in peace? Not if knucklehead half-brother Gino has…
I am Susie Black. Before I became an award-winning, humorous, cozy mystery author, I had a successful career as a ladies’ swimwear sales exec. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time in Florida. I interacted with progressive, traditional, and conservative buyers and sellers from large cities to small towns all over the Sunshine State. My experiences gave me a unique perspective on the social mores and hierarchy of Florida’s diverse, multi-layered, and complicated society.
Maybe it’s because, as a woman who worked in a historically male-dominated industry, I always root for the underdog—be it a newbie with the chutzpah to say no to a pushy buyer or a small town fighting off a huge conglomerate. Give me a character who is a caricature of an amusement park scion, dialog dripping with sarcasm, and a zany plot that spits in the eye of corporate America.
I led the applause as S. V. Date gleefully poked fun at the greediness of big business while indicting a state government that, for a price, was more than happy to go along for the ride.
A witty satire of planned communities introduces readers to Serenity, Florida--the lifelong dream of amusement park scion Waldo Whipple--a town on the verge of a very public nervous breakdown. 10,000 first printing.
The Everlasting Life of Charlie Wall
by
Paul Wilborn,
It’s 1985, and Ronald Armstrong, known in the magic mushroom trade as “Trip,” takes a “sober” job as a driver for a retired Tampa mobster. His boss, Charlie Wall, has survived four attempts on his life, the last one in 1955. When Charlie falls into depression, Trip rebuilds his boss’…
I am Susie Black. Before I became an award-winning, humorous, cozy mystery author, I had a successful career as a ladies’ swimwear sales exec. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time in Florida. I interacted with progressive, traditional, and conservative buyers and sellers from large cities to small towns all over the Sunshine State. My experiences gave me a unique perspective on the social mores and hierarchy of Florida’s diverse, multi-layered, and complicated society.
I bet it’s because I lived on a houseboat for ten years that this hilarious book grabbed me by the sea legs and never let me go. Nothing tickles my funny bone more than a group of people who have nothing in common and are thrown together on a boat out to sea but going in circles.
The antics of this ship of fools on a gambling boat who are seemingly clueless as to the ship’s nefarious real business make for a madcap tale of side-splitting laughter.
The Extravaganza of the Seas is a 5,000-ton cash cow, a top-heavy tub whose sole function is to carry gamblers three miles from the Florida coast, take their money, then bring them back so they can find more money. Travelling this trip are Fay Benton, a single mom and cocktail waitress, desperate for something to go right for a change; Johnny and the Contusions, a ship's band with so little talent they are, well, the ship's band; Arnold and Phil, two refugees from the Beaux Arts Senior Centre; Lou Tarant, a wide, bald man who has killed nine people, though…
I love being by the water. Most of my vacations are spent at tropical destinations. There’s something pretty amazing about reading a book at the water’s edge, near a palm tree, with the breeze and the salty smell of the wonderful warm air as pelicans swoop across the surface.
I love being in the Everglades of South Florida. I love the crazy characters and their wild pursuits of making money. There are a lot of 70s musical references and nostalgia for the reader.
One could really believe this may be based on true events because, after all, it’s Florida.
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times bestselling author and actual Florida Man Dave Barry returns with a Florida caper full of oddballs and more twists and turns than a snake slithering away from a gator.
Jesse Braddock is trapped in a tiny cabin deep in the Everglades with her infant daughter and her ex-boyfriend, a wannabe reality TV star who turned out to be a lot prettier on the outside than on the inside. Broke and desperate for a way out, Jesse stumbles across a long-lost treasure, which could solve all her problems—if she can figure out how to keep it.…
I teach and have written too many articles on these books as an English professor. There’s a time for tragic or difficult books (James Joyce, anyone?), but also a time for fun, and I believe it’s good for my students to giggle and enjoy reading while they learn. As a Canadian, I’m told my humor is dry but warmer, and accordingly, the books I prefer make me think—and some break my heart—but my favorites also make me laugh. If you want a quality read but aren’t above a fart joke, I hope you will check out my list.
How often have I heard, “Oh, Q. W. Aardvark’s fantasy is awesome, but you really need to read all 8,326 books in the series to get it”! How about no? Fortunately, I learned the secret of Pratchett’s Discworld series: each novel is freestanding.
I like this book because it’s like a cynical, bitter uncle who secretly has a teddy bear—despite the outward grime and gloom of the setting, there’s a hilarious wit, punning, and barrage of pop references underlying the story that gives it a heart. It’s fantasy for those who don’t think they like it.
First book of the original and best CITY WATCH series, now reinterpreted in BBC's The Watch
'This is one of Pratchett's best books. Hilarious and highly recommended' The Times
The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is . . . _________________
'It was the usual Ankh-Morpork mob in times of crisis; half of them were here to complain, a quarter of them were here to watch the other half, and the…
I grew up in central Arkansas, which means I experienced first-hand the fiction I describe here. The South in these books - its religion, poverty, and beauty, not to mention its capacity for real ugliness - is not simply an atmosphere these authors have used to decorate their sets. The South in these books is a place where real people live, in exactly the ways these writers have described. My novella, Six Mile Store, is my own take on the real South. These are the books that showed me that these kinds of Southern stories are worth telling.
The film adaptations make True Grit look like a Western. It is not.
It is an Arkansas book, and Mattie Ross is an Arkansas character: fourteen years old, tiny, and completely on board with the violence she knows avenging her father's murder will require. She has courage and goal-oriented ruthlessness.
Mattie’s fortitude underlines the gap between what my characters can see for themselves and what they can actually reach. That gap is at the heart of what my novella is about.
There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down…
Time travel has always been my favorite genre of storytelling. Devouring every time travel book, movie, TV series, or comic strip I’ve come across in my life got me thinking a lot about cause and effect, chicken and egg, before and after. I eventually came to realize the literary world of prequels and sequels with multiple book series didn’t always have to be read in the order of release, especially if, as a reader, you had a late start that was still “new to you.”
Sequel/prequel/sidequel/timequel: reading a series out of order is a whole new type of adventure.
I’d never heard the term “epistolary novel” prior to reading Michael Kun’s The Locklear Letters, but was immediately smitten with the concept of telling a story solely through a series of letters and/or emails sent by the narrator.
This sequel follows the same template and the same protagonist a decade down the line. I liken it to finding a boxful of letters and using them to piece together a hilarious comedy of errors. Maybe you’ll keep digging and find an older box later, or maybe the archivist kept orderly annals, allowing you to move forward through the years.
Sequencing doesn’t matter, but the written words will leave you in stitches.
Sid Straw, the author of the correspondence that forms Everybody Says Hello, isn t Everyman, but he is someone everyone knows. He tries just a little too hard, says just a little too much, and that extra effort and those extra words are often his undoing. If only Sid could get out of his own way, his life would be wonderful. While Sid Straw may frustrate you at times, you ll end up rooting for him the same way you root for your own equally imperfect friends.
For me, the most affecting stories are those that are leavened with a sardonic sensibility. Italo Calvino, one of my favorite writers, notes “th[e] particular connection between melancholy and humor,” speaking of how great writing “foregrounds [with] tiny, luminous traces that counterpoint the dark catastrophe.” I’ve always veered toward the great literary comic writers—from Cervantes to Laurence Sterne to Pynchon, with a particular reverence for Nabokov. For me, there is no greater exposition of the underbelly of love and madness than Lolita; of artistic obsession than Pale Fire. Nabokov believed that the best writing places the reader under a spell, enchanting them with the magic of words — and I concur!
Eddy Bale becomes a crusader for children after the death of his own young son and decides to take a group of terminally ill children to Disneyland for a holiday. The antic hyperbolic tone of the narration is utterly at odds with the grave subject matter and the novel is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.
Abandoned by his wife and devastated by the death of his twelve-year old son, Eddy Bale becomes obsessed with the plight of terminally ill children and develops a plan to provide a last hurrah dream vacation for seven children who will never grow-up. Eddy and his four dysfunctional chaperones journey to the entertainment capital of America--Disney World. Once they arrive, a series of absurdities characteristic of an Elkin novel--including a freak snowstorm and a run-in with a vengeful Mickey Mouse--transform Eddy's idealistic wish into a fantastic nightmare.
I started drawing comics in the first grade and have never stopped. My syndicated comic strip, Cow & Boy, ran for eight years, and now I write and draw the middle-grade fantasy series Quest Kids. I am so fortunate to have cobbled together my love of comics into a career and to have been inspired by so many talented people along the way. Below is a collection of some of the best.
My newspaper comic strip had just finished its run, and I was looking for my next big thing. That’s when I came across Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
The drawings were simple and hilarious, and the clever writing didn’t seem to be just for kids. Greg Heffley has this flawed prickly everyman edge which makes him easy to identify with. But as good as this book and series are, I was more impressed with the new way Jeff Kinney had found to sneak comics into chapter books.
The launch of an exciting and innovatively illustrated new series narrated by an unforgettable kid every family can relate to
It's a new school year, and Greg Heffley finds himself thrust into middle school, where undersized weaklings share the hallways with kids who are taller, meaner, and already shaving. The hazards of growing up before you're ready are uniquely revealed through words and drawings as Greg records them in his diary.
In book one of this debut series, Greg is happy to have Rowley, his sidekick, along for the ride. But when Rowley's star…
