What books are on your nightstand?
Having just finished Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age this evening [1], I've got the following books queued up next:
All books about food! I guess I'm a bit obsessed.
[1] I'm working my way backwards through Stephenson's stuff, though of course I did read the Baroque Trilogy in the proper order, as doing otherwise would've been fairly silly.
TDA started out a little bit slowly for me--which always tends to be the case more w/ fiction than non-, just because I don't really care that much about anyone in the story, and it has no grounding in reality. But and also I'm not really a fan of science fiction that much--or really, fiction in general--and so it took me about a week to get through the first 75 pages of TDA, because it suffered from some of the typical things that annoy me about science fiction, particularly the overuse of jargon-y language.
But once I told myself to just sit down and fucking read it this weekend, it turned out that I really loved it, as I figured I might. What struck me most about it is how apt its subtitle ("Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer") is--said primer is one of the key items in the book, obviously, but it's also a remarkably apt description of this book, in the way that it's basically a young Victorian woman's saga wrapped up in science fiction garments. Which probably explains why I enjoyed it more than most science fiction.
if you're into food books, i recommend reading "the man who ate everything" and "it must have been something i ate" by jeffery steingarten. He's a great writer, the books are collections of his column from vogue ,and i wish I had never seen Iron Chef America, because he's an arrogant jackass of a judge on it..
Posted by: Daryn | August 28, 2006 at 12:41 AM
If you need more insight into competitive eating, the not as well-titled
Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit
is also around. (Not that I have read either :-)
Posted by: saintloup | August 28, 2006 at 07:29 AM
I love the Diamond Age, it was the first Stephenson I ever read and for a long time my favorite. I read Omnivore's Dilemma a month ago, finished Steingarten's It Must Have Been Something I Ate this morning and Bourdain's Nasty Bits is up next. I think we have lots of book overlap!
Posted by: lia | August 28, 2006 at 12:39 PM
Daryn: yep, I loved both of Steingarten's books!
And I guess I've been lucky in not having watched any of Iron Chef America, then--watching Bobby Flay stand up on the kitchen counter in that big championship thing they had a couple of years ago turned me off of the idea of an Iron Chef America for good, I think. :)
Posted by: btrott | August 28, 2006 at 01:03 PM