A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain

It took me a really long time to finish this book. I generally like Anthony Bourdain and the language was simple, but it still took me over two weeks to finish a 274 page book (I spent 4 days on the last 20 pages!). This is really unheard of for an English major who is used to reading almost 300 pages in an evening.

Now, just because it took me so long to finish the book doesn't mean I hated it. I generally enjoyed most of it, and honestly I don't think the book really had enough substance for me to hate it. The real problem was that this book had no forward motion. Every chapter was an entity entirely separate from the rest of the book, so when I finished one section I didn't feel compelled to continue on to the next one. Bourdain slaps on an intro that attempts to tie the chapters together because each one is a part of his 'search for the perfect meal,' but the fact is that the book is just a bunch of separate short stories which he ties together with a forced feeling and overly sappy 2 page conclusion.

 Bourdain wrote the book during the year that he travelled around the world filming his first show, A Cook's Tour, that ran on the Food Network for a season in the early 2000's. Each chapter is set in a different country and you follow Bourdain as eats a huge variety of food (the still beating heart of cobra!), meets colorful characters, does some crazy things (jumping into a Russian lake frozen over with ice after being in a sauna for an hour, etc), and generally gets drunk all the time. So, as anyone who has seen A Cook's Tour or No Reservations could tell, the book really reads as though it is a mishmash of episodes from a TV show. While Bourdain is good at translating these escapades into writing, I just couldn't help feeling as though I'd rather be watching these adventures on the screen. Getting a huge list of the foods he's eating, most of which are unfamiliar to me, just doesn't do the same justice to the experience as actually seeing the food, and watching his reactions as he eats them. While I do like getting Bourdain's genuine opinions and feelings, instead of something edited down by the Food Network or Travel Channel, the book felt a little incomplete without having seen the series also.

I don't mean to sound as though I really disliked the book, it just didn't hold my attention as much as I thought it would when I began reading. That being said, it was generally enjoyable: I learned some cool things about other cultures, built up an appetite to be a little more daring in my culinary choices, and realized with more urgency that there is so much going on in the world that I would really like to see (damn you, Bourdain, and your all expenses paid trips around the world!!). If you're interested in food, travel, and you like No Reservations, you'll probably like this book.

Note: I haven't actually read it, but I've heard from multiple reliable sources that Bourdain's first book, Kitchen Confidential, is awesome and probably a better read than A Cook's Tour.