Relentless Self-Promotion -- Done RIGHT!
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I am currently reading The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine by Steven Rinella. It’s sort of a road book meets hunting book meets culinary book, and it’s fun. Mr. Rinella’s activities as he tries to collect ingredients to re-create a 3-day, 45-course meal from Le Guide Culinaire are very entertaining.
I decided to put down ONLY REVOLUTIONS for the time being. Though I was enjoying the book, I was struggling with it because this period of time is so busy with the holidays and my busiest time at work. I kept losing the thread of the book because I wasn’t able to devote the time and attention this book demands and deserves. I will get back to it once things calm down, and will start with SAM’S side this time, as it seems the more logical place to begin.
So, I’ve put it down in favor of GASTRONAUT by Stefan Gates. Gates is an “epicurean desperado”, willing to cook and eat anything — at least once. After all, he argues, if we eat 22 tons of food over our lifetimes and use 16% of our waking lives preparing food, shouldn’t we try for the occasional “culinary epiphany” by maximizing our “excitement-to-mastication ratio”?
I like the light tone of this book. It’s interesting reading and going quickly, so I will soon have to decide what to read next…
Currently reading ONLY REVOLUTIONS by Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of the very-weird and much-enjoyed House of Leaves. This book is more challenging than House of Leaves and I am not immediately enjoying it as much. However, I will stick with it.
If you’re interested in an unusual story told in an unusual way, check out either of those books.
Tonight was Wendy’s early night off of work, so she got home around 7:00pm. I’d been home since about 5:30, reading over the Only Revolutions website & forums. Mark Z. Danielewski is one tripped-out author — he’s the same guy that wrote the mammoth House of Leaves, a 700+ page horror story told on many levels. It was described by the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle as: “A rollicking Pynchonesque oddity, a Nabokovian linguistic obsession, and a Borgesian unreality, House of Leaves jumps and skips and plays with genre-wrecking abandon, postmodern panache, and an obsessively imaginative scope that absolutely shames most books on the market today”.
Tags: books, danielewski, drewvogel, reading
Currently reading The Reach of a Chef by fellow-Ohioan Michael Ruhlman. I’ve read the others in this series, The Making of a Chef and The Soul of a Chef, and enjoyed them both. When I saw this new book in the bookstore, it was an instant buy.
Next, I may read either A Return to Cooking or Charcuterie book, both by Ruhlman.
I picked up ACCESS ALL AREAS: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration on a lark — it’s light reading (not particularly well-written) on a subject that greatly interests me.
Next up… I’m not sure!