astradele

Reading this book on my daily commute certainly stirred up an appetite by the time I reached my destination!

The colourful speech and frank tone of Kitchen Confidential is also present in this book, and still very entertaining. However, I found the book more like a collection of short stories than one continuous piece, as it jumped from country to country, and sometimes back to a previous country.

There’s some discussion of the culture that surrounds the food, but it certainly doesn’t have the detail that he provided about professional cooking.

My favourite aspect to this book is the flair and passion for describing food, done so well with imaginative descriptions that I feel like I can almost taste it. If restaurant menus were all written with such expertise, I’d by hypnotized into always eating out!

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3RGKXSI2LTX4H/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

I try to always have a few unread books on my shelf, of both the leisure and “other” variety.

I’m currently reading a book in the leisure category, so my next should be of a different type.

Any suggestions on:

1. Term for non-leisure books other than “other” or “non-leisure”?
2. Criteria to use when selecting a non-leisure book to read?

Looking at my shelf, my unread options are:

• Code Complete 2nd edition
• Beyond Bullet Points
• The Contract and Fee Setting Guide
• Rapid Development
• The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms
• Head First PMP

And then there are the ones I read a lot of, but didn’t completely finish:

• Peer Reviews in Software
• The Consultant’s Calling
• How to Persuade People Who Don’t Want to be Persuaded
• Ask the Headhunter
• The Essential Drucker
• Getting Things Done
• Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives

I needed something lighter after reading Software Estimation, so I turned to my shelf to look for non-computer, non-business, non-finance related books that I had not yet read. There weren’t very many.

Lukily (as the book is on loan from a friend for about 15 months now), I found A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain. I loved his writing style in Kitchen Confidential: refreshingly direct and colourful.

I have high hopes for a similarly entertaining and colourful narrative about the cuisines and food cultures of exotic locations. I watched part of the television series by the same name, which was quite good – and the book is usually better than the video.