Life & Wisdom Quote by John Sladek

A sly confession dressed up as a reading habit, Sladek's line needles the idea of stable taste. "I usually like whatever I've recently finished best" is a miniature satire of criticism itself: the mind, he implies, is easily seduced by proximity. Recency isn't just a bias; it's a flattering illusion that the latest thing completed must be the most satisfying, because it carries the warm afterglow of closure. You liked it best because you survived it, because you can finally stop thinking about it.

Coming from Sladek, a writer steeped in speculative fiction's tradition of dismantling human pretensions, the joke cuts two ways. On the surface it's self-deprecation, the author admitting his enthusiasms are fickle. Underneath, it's a jab at how we assign value: not by some objective metric, but by whatever still has fingerprints on it. Finishing becomes a kind of argument for quality. If your time is spent, your brain wants a refund in the form of fondness.

There's also an author's wink here. Writers are often most in love with their newest work because it's the one that still feels alive, still unsullied by reviews, sales, or the slow fossilization of "early period" versus "late period". Sladek compresses that creative psychology into a single, throwaway sentence that sounds casual while quietly indicting the machinery of taste-making. The line lands because it treats preference as a mood, not a verdict, and dares the reader to notice how often their own "best" is just "most recent."