Books we love about where we live

What constitutes a classic Florida book? An author's passion for sabal palms, hurricane warnings, mildew, mojitos and the ability to pluck nuggets of truth from our rich and sometimes ugly history? A wicked sense of humor about the subtropical oddities -- flying cucarachas, copulating iguanas, six-toed cats, swamp-eating developers -- skittering through our everyday lives? We like to think that the theme that sets true South Florida literary classics apart from books spawned elsewhere is their unerring sense of the place and the people who constitute Florida's bizarre mixture of paradise and hell.

``Florida was to Americans what America had always been to the rest of the world -- a fresh, free, unspoiled start,'' writes Susan Orlean in The Orchid Thief . To us, though, Florida is something else: home. Here are some of the timeless classics that capture life in the Sunshine State:

Their Eyes Were Watching God , Zora Neale Hurston: Published in 1937 and set in Eatonville near Orlando, this gorgeous

The private John Updike

Originally published January 30, 1994

. . . authors are a dreadful clan / To be avoided if you can,

-- From 'I Missed His Book, but I Read His Name' by John Updike BEVERLY FARMS, Mass.-- A conspiracy of near-zero temperatures, sluggish airports and an inadvertent swerve past Salem's Lydia Pinkham Memorial has made you more than an hour late, but the angular form unfolding from a seat near the rear of K.C.'s Restaurant & Pub is not in the least bit dreadful. Your anemic apology is whisked aside with a handshake and a light quip about how you have "fought your way over the frozen tundra in a malfunctioning dog sled to get here." Then John Updike slides back into the wretched, patched vinyl booth and orders soup and a tuna sandwich. "So you see, I'm a cheap date."

Q & A | Gerald Martin: On Gabriel García Márquez

David Diaz is a copy editor for The Miami Herald. He asked this of Gerald Martin, who has written ``Gabriel García Márquez: A Life'' (Random House, $37.50:

Q. How much of an influence was Mrquez's early childhood living with his grandparents in Aracataca on his writing career, in general? Did that time period define his writing?

Rich material in Salinger's chosen home

J.D. Salinger supposedly spent the latter half of his life writing for his own pleasure, composing each day in a pine house in the hills that overlooked towering maple trees, plowed hay fields and the neighboring mountains of Vermont.

The author of "The Catcher in the Rye," who died last week at age 91, lived here for more than 50 years and continued to publish throughout his first decade in Cornish, releasing such fiction as "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction." But while he surely appreciated a setting that was "nice and peaceful," a wish Holden Caulfield expressed in "Catcher," Salinger was essentially a cosmopolitan author who set much of his fiction on campuses and in his native New York City and the surrounding area.

The book world knows no greater mystery than what Salinger might have written since he stopped sharing his work with the public in the 1960s. Former neighbor Jerry Burt has said, and continues to say, that Salinger told him he was

Q & A | Jaime Bayly: A conservative antibourgeois

Olga Connor, who writes often for El Nuevo Herald about Cuban culture, interviewed Jaime Bayly, the well-known Peruvian writer and journalist whose latest book is ``El Cojo y el Loco'' (``The Mad and the Cripple'') (Alfaguara, $16.99):

With a reputation as an enfant terrible of television, Jaime Bayly has the luxury of writing any way he wants, about whatever he wants and however he wants, without apparent limitations or reservations.

His newspaper columns earn him the disgust of many, who nevertheless read them. He knows how to entertain, is a political conservative (but simultaneously a social radical) who admits to being bisexual for a long time, back to the days when it wasn't fashionable, in the bosom of a very conservative society in Lima, Peru.