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Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Confessions of a Culinary Thrill Seekerby Robb Walsh Robb Walsh was in the advertising business when he started writing about food and restaurants on the side. Pretty soon, newspapers were paying him to travel to different parts of the world and review unusual foods. Not long after that, he lost his advertising job and his wife divorced him. He’s still writing about food, though, and according to his blog, he’s married again. Are You Really Going to Eat That? is a collection of some of the articles he has written for various newspapers and magazines from 1993 to 2003. Don’t let the title fool you. While Walsh really has eaten bugs and other stuff that most people in the United States would find extremely unusual, that’s not what this book is about. These articles are about more than just restaurants and food. Walsh gets a little bit of culture and history. He also introduces us to some interesting people like Jay, the owner of a Houston bagel shop who threatens him for taking notes in the restaurant. I doubt you’ll visit many of the places Walsh writes about, but the stories he tells are interesting enough to keep you reading. Most of the foods Walsh tries aren’t that far out, especially if you live in California. You might learn about some new foods, but a lot of it is about fairly ordinary things like hot sauce, coffee, cheese, oysters, crabs, and bagels. However, Walsh always finds some interesting angle on his foods, and he often travels to various parts of Europe or the Americas to learn more. For example, he goes to Switzerland and France to find out who really invented Gruyère cheese, since the two countries have been fighting over it for years and years. He heads down to Argentina to check out the pizza places in Buenos Aires.* He visits Trinidad to find out about curry and hot sauce, and he goes to a prison to find a famous soul food chef. Of course, he does spend some time looking at foods that some of you may not be familiar with. My favorite is the durian, a huge, spiky fruit that tastes delicious and smells like a herd of rotting cows. (It’s the fruit on the cover, right beneath the machete.) As a bonus, Walsh includes twenty recipes that you might (or might not) want to try out. You can read some of it online at Google Books. If you need more, you can check out the author’s blog. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the school library.
You can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 5, 2012 at 4:04 pm UTC. Click here to see newer information. August 13th, 2009
 Tags: celebrities, collections, cooking, funny, real people |  Category: Food, Nonfiction, Travel
|  Write a comment | The Last Wishby Andrzej Sapkowski Geralt de Rivia is a witcher, a monster hunter who uses magic, alchemy, his sword, and his brain to deal with dangerous creatures. He works as a mercenary, and he has a quirky sense of right and wrong. He has no problem killing three guys who attack him in a bar, for example, but he won’t immediately try to kill every supernatural menace he encounters. In this world, humans are often more evil than monsters, so maybe the person who hired Geralt is the villain and the creature Geralt has been hired to kill isn’t. The Last Wish is a series of connected short stories. Geralt is recovering from his wounds in a temple, and the stories are flashbacks or stories he shares with people there. This isn’t traditional heroic fantasy. As I said before, Geralt has a strange code of ethics, and sometimes he is tricked by a bad person into doing the wrong thing. The setting is kind of dark and gritty. The old, magical world is dying, and the new world is dominated by humans. People come to the wilderness, start new towns, and drive the monsters away. There is no one big bad out to conquer or destroy the world. Instead, we have evil humans and monsters facing extinction and trying to fight back. There are some sexual situations in the story (including some in the first two pages), but most of it is only alluded to. This is part of a larger series, which includes the TV series The Hexer (forget about the movie), several novels, some graphic novels, and a video game called The Witcher. The stories were all originally written in Polish; most, but not all, of the stories have been translated into English. You can read some of the book online at the publisher’s website. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 3, 2012 at 5:05 pm UTC. Click here to see newer information. July 31st, 2009
Tags: action, alchemy, books with movies, collections, fairy tales, magic, monsters, supernatural, vampires | Category: Fantasy, Fiction
| Write a comment | H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural: Classic Tales of the Macabreedited by Stephen Jones H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural is a collection nineteenth-century horror stories. Even if you don’t like horror, keep reading. These stories are not the kind of things that Steven King or Clive Barker write. This book includes short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Washington Irving, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These stories are much more about developing an eerie atmosphere than they are about violence, blood, and terror. H. P. Lovecraft was one of the most famous and influential horror writers in the United States. In addition to short stories and novellas, he wrote “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” an essay about the history of horror stories. For this book, Stephen Jones has collected nineteen of the stories from Lovecraft’s essay. These are some of the best short horror stories of the past 200 years: if you want to know who influenced your favorite horror authors, or if you dislike modern horror but enjoy weird stories, this might be a good book to read. This is actually the second one of these collections that Stephen Jones has done. The first is called H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 6, 2012 at 2:14 am UTC. July 20th, 2009
Tags: collections, gothic, murder, super, supernatural | Category: Fiction, Horror
| Write a comment | Algernon Blackwood has been called the master of the English ghost story. He is often listed in the horror section, although he didn’t write what you probably consider horror. Blackwood’s stories are about the supernatural – ghosts, magic, and other strange creatures. Sometimes bad things happen, but some times they don’t. His stories aren’t terrifying in the blood and gore and monsters everywhere sense, but they are usually eerie or strange. He was a master of atmosphere and buildup, Blackwood wrote a lot of short stories, and his themes ranged from reincarnation to romance to encounters with strange, unexplained creatures. However, almost every one of his stories has some weird element to it. Algernon Blackwood isn’t that famous among people who read modern horror, but he had a strong influence on H. P. Lovecraft and probably many modern horror writers, too. Where to Find His BooksYou can read a lot of his books and stories online at the Penn State Online Books page. You can get them from the public library.
This list was last updated February 1, 2012 at 3:09 am UTC. Click here to see newer information. July 18th, 2009
Tags: author, cats, collections, england, magic, monsters, psychic powers, supernatural | Category: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Supernatural Investigation
| Write a comment | The Dog is Not a Toy: House Rule #4by Darby Conley Get Fuzzy is a comic strip about a fairly ordinary guy named Rob, his slightly evil cat Bucky, and his lovable but stupid dog Satchel. Bucky is usually rude, insulting, and destructive, although every once in a while he’ll do something nice for Rob or Bucky. He is constantly coming up with crazy schemes that never work. For example, he has tried designing tee shirts, writing books, and making music, but he isn’t really smart enough to do any of it well. Satchel, on the other hand, is almost always in a good mood and likes nearly everybody. The only way he can live with Bucky and still be in a good happy all the time is to be a little simple, but we love him anyway. One of the really impressive things about Get Fuzzy is that almost every panel is funny. A lot of cartoons use the first panel or two is used to set up the one joke in the strip, but Darby Conley usually manages to make the setup funny, too. Even when nobody says anything, you can probably find something funny in the picture. Bucky’s facial expressions are priceless – they combine arrogance, hostility, and total cluelessness. Rob has a very good “WTF? Why did I even get up this morning?” expression that he has to use a lot around Bucky and Satchel. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 6, 2012 at 8:47 am UTC. Nighthogs: a Pearls Before Swine CollectionPearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comic strips. Pearls Before Swine is about the adventures of anthropomorphic (human-like) animals; the primary characters are Rat, Pig, Zebra, and Goat. Rat is dishonest and cynical. Pig is… special. But he’s happy, too. Zebra is always trying to help out his relatives who live in the wild, but they always get eaten by lions. Goat is the smart one, so naturally he doesn’t like interacting with the others. There are a bunch of minor characters, too. Guard Duck is a paranoid duck whose first plan for any situation involves a rocket launcher. Unfortunately, he seems to own a lot of rockets. Snuffles is a cat who divides his time between looking cute and committing all kinds of serious crimes. A whole bunch of crocodiles live next door to Zebra. They would really love to catch and eat him, but they are far too stupid to be a threat (to him, at least). Stephan Pastis, the writer, shows up in the comic strip from time to time. Many of the other characters hate him. There are a couple of features that may attract or repel you. First, there are a lot of death jokes. If crocodiles show up in a comic strip, odds are that at least one of them will get killed. Some strips start off like “So X died yesterday.” We’ve never met X, but he/she had to die to set up the joke that’s coming. Also, there’s cannibalism. Half the time, when Pig goes to a restaurant, he orders a ham sandwich or a BLT or something else with pork in it. Yeah, Pig’s special. Second, Stephan Pastis loves puns, and he goes out of his way to work them in. Sometimes a Sunday comic, one of the really long ones, is nothing but preparation for a single pun. I don’t think the puns themselves are always very funny, even for puns, but I really have to laugh at the massive amount of effort he put into setting it up If you want to see what the comic strip is like, it runs in several Contra Costa newspapers, or you can read it online. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 5, 2012 at 2:17 am UTC. Click here to see newer information. June 28th, 2009
Tags: collections, friendship, funny, morbid, surreal | Category: Comics, Humor
| Write a comment | Love Songby Keiko Nishi An anthology of four short stories by amazing artist/writer Nishi: a story about abusive love, an Edgar Alan Poe-like horror piece, a portrait of a far-future Chinese dumpling maker who dreams of Earth, and a bullied boy who develops astonishing healing powers, becomes a celebrity, and must deal with the consequences. Touching, shocking, and memorable. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the public library.
Since Contra Costa libraries only have a few copies of Love Song, you might want to request it through Link+. You get the book through your local library, so you will need to have a library card.
You might want to read the rules for borrowing books before you request anything. If you want to check
on the book or cancel your order, go here. June 10th, 2009
Tags: abuse, bullying, celebrity, collections | Category: Contemporary Fantasy, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Manga, Science Fiction, Slice of Life
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