I'm a big fan of John D. MacDonald's
Travis McGee series. There are 21 books in the series, the first of which was published nearly 40 years ago, and the last about 18 years ago. Despite their age, the books are very entertaining and contain tidbits of wisdom ahead of their time (
A nice list of quotes from the books).
The fictitious McGee lived on a houseboat in the real Bahia Mar marina. The real Slip F-18 didn't exist, but a plaque was placed at the marina in 1987 to commemorate the famous character. Apparently the plaque was removed a couple years ago to make way for renovations, but it will be replaced and rededicated on October 2. I wish I could attend, but I'll have to settle for visiting the location on a future trip to South Florida.
I like this quote from
Cinnamon Skin, written in 1982, which nicely describes computers and the Internet today:
Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes.
There's so much good stuff in those books...go read 'em!
Update 2005-10-26: The links I had died. Thank you very much big-name newspapers who hide their web archives behind logins and payments.
Here's a link that works.
