New Chapters

Medium Raw, Anthony Bourdain
Anyone who read Bourdain's first book, Kitchen Confidential, and is looking for a sequel needs to look elsewhere. Anthony Bourdain has come a long way from the bitter, cynical, darkly humorous, coke-addicted chef in the first book. Now he's a bitter, cynical, darkly humorous food writer/tv star. The main difference between the two books is that Medium Raw, much like The Guinea Pig Diaries, seems to be as much a compilation of separate essays as one coherent book. That said, the essays are still entertaining. The main exception occurs when Bourdain hovers too long on personalities in the food business without sufficiently making the reader care. For the most part, though, he hits his mark. He's witty and often (for me at least) laugh out loud funny. For someone who enjoys Top Chef and felt horrified by Fast Food Nation, this is a great choice. (Note: when tagging this post, I realized I have a LOT of food related tags. I guess I shouldn't be surprised!)

Borrowed from the library

I Write Like...

Today I stumbled across I Write Like, a website which lets you paste in some of the text you've written and find out which famous author you write like. I tried three of my recent blog posts and was told I write like either J.K. Rowling (yes!), Margaret Atwood (superb!), and someone whose name I've already forgotten (my brain only has so much space). I didn't think much of it further than something to amuse myself while I was bored until I saw this on Paper Cuts:

I entered my last blog post and was told I write like Edgar Allan Poe. (Judging from the Twitter traffic, so do a lot of other people.)

Pretty neat. But then a colleague plugged in a paragraph from Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and was told it sounded like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Now THAT made me laugh!