"The Nasty Bits" - Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain is the chef de cuisine at a French restaurant in Manhattan who achieved a degree of notoriety a few years back with a tell all autobiography of his life as a journeyman chef in New York called "Kitchen Confidential". "The Nasty Bits" is a collection of essays and articles he's written over the past several years things from dining in Vietnam to how a Central American and Mexican cooks are the real engines behind even the most upscale American restaurants and it's a great thing.
Bourdain is an ex-junkie and is clearly a food and adrenaline freak now. He writes in a sharp, profanity laced style that makes you want to try exotic ingredients and visit strange locales. He also provides numerous descriptions of how a kitchen works and how professional cooks operate. I admit to being enthralled by even simply adequate descriptions of competent people working at their crafts and trades. Bourdain is much better than merely adequate.
He had a show on the Food Network that was cancelled for not being downmarket enough. Now he's on the Travel Channel and was recently caught in Beirut during the war's outbreak.

"Life With Father" - Clarence Day

"Life With Father" is the basis for the classic William Powell (to whom we should all genuflect towards as a paradigm of martini drinking class) movie about the eponymous Father and his family in 1880's Manhattan. The book is a collection of New Yorker pieces written by Clarence Day about his father, also named Clarence, describing events from childhood to adulthood.
Father is a successful Wall Street broker and more than set in his ways. He was a man who would try to force the world to move concert with the tunes he demanded be played and more often than not succeed. Between his sons who he often saw as undisciplined and his wife who he saw as occassionally frivolous, Father found himself having to move the world, or at least his immediate environs, off its normal axis more than a few times.
There's a companion book called "Life With Mother" that I have read yet but I look forward to doing so at some point.

"Strange Places" - Mike Mignola

"Hellboy: Strange Places" is the latest collection of recent Hellboy comics and after the hit or miss nature of the BPRD books is a great addition. "Strange Places" lets the reading public in on where Hellboy went after leaving the too warm embrace of the BPRD (Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense) at the end of "Conqueror Worm." Great book but only if you've read all the rest.

"A Year in Van Nuys" - Sandra Tsing Loh

Tsing Loh is a very funny writer and radio personality from southern California. I first heard her years ago on Market Place on public radio and was hooked. She writes very scathingly about the ridiculousness of much of modern mores, particularly the sort of elite snobbishness that tries to portray itself as simply an enlightened attitude towards parenting, social standing, education and the like.
The book is her take on the year surrounding her effort to break her writer's block and develop a tv pilot from a concept of hers. The insanity and inanity of dealing with the tv industry has been covered before but she has a degree of snarkiness and sheer unbelief that she's really being allowed to help steer the creation of a pilot that makes it seem fresh.
Along the way she also comments on her daily struggles with a musician husband who's forced to travel much of the time and a very successful and often overbearing older sister. Very funny stuff even if some of it feels like it's been done before.

"The Book of the Dead" - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

"The Book of the Dead" is Preston and Child's concluding book in their Pendergast Trilogy and their seventh book about the eccentric FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast. They bring to a superbly ludicrous climax Pendergast's struggle with his insane younger brother, Diogenes. Also, all the major players from the earlier volumes are brought on stage and even all the minor ones seem to resurface for cameos.

Preston and Child are marvelous creators of fun, modern pulp writing. Specifically shudderpulp. While there's super science and secret martial arts and impenetrable disguises, there's nothing supernatural despite it always being suspected. Everything's mechanical in the end and it's always goofy fun seeing how they manufacture rationales for the events in the books.

Fun stuff and worth checking out. Note - They may look like big books (and there are 7 of them) but they read super fast.

"Mary Poppins Opens the Door" - P L Travers

"Mary Poppins Opens the Door" is the third book in PL Travers' surreal series about the tough, magical nanny and London's Banks family. Travers' books are, as is often the case, are much richer things than the Disney movie. Shamefully, the movie is such a powerful icon Travers' books seem almost unknown.

She was born in Australia in 1899 and lived until 1996. She was a poet, author, student of mystic Gurdjieff and comparative myths and religion. She knew Yeats and Eliot. All these things clearly influence the stories she told about Mary Poppins and are missing from the Julie Andrews' movie.

All the books so far (I've read 3 of 5) follow the same basic pattern. Mary appears mysteriously, corrals the Banks children into order and brings them on strange trips and adventures which she later makes no indication of having any knowledge of. Then she leaves as strangely as she arrived. The following book then opens with the Banks' household having fallen into disarray after Mary's disappearance which is promptly set aright by her return.

Mary is tough, opinionated (and always right), strong willed and smart. Everywhere she goes she is treated with great deference and respect. She most assuredly does not break into song and Bert does not speak in Dick Van Dyke's atrocious Cockney accent.

Check them out. All except the last one (Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane and Mary Poppins and the House Next Door) are readily available.

Cheap Trick

In addition to Heart, I've been listening to a lot of surf music and Cheap Trick lately. They really are the great missing link between great power pop, proto-punk, and arena ready music. Their lyrics are off kilter and slightly subversive and they combine great musicianship with tight song writing and a great theatrical presentation; two oddballs with two blow-dried pretty boys.

From 1977's "Cheap Trick" through 1983's "Next Position Please" they released 8 dang near perfect albums. From the unfiltered roar of their debut, to the almost too clean "In Color" and "Heaven Tonight", followed by the utterly triumphant "At Budokan", the insane maxed out production of "Dream Police" and "All Shook Up" and finally the slow return to earth and hints of being mere humans with "One on One" and finally "Next Position Please", they just cranked out some of the most inspired and often goofy music of my youth.

After that they had some big and crappy hits (ie - "The Flame") and put out a bunch of unlistenable albums. They finally returned to form in 1997 with another "Cheap Trick" and a series of shows that culminated with their 25th anniversary (with a mega show in their hometown of Rockford, Illinois recorded as the album "Silver").

A fun band with more great albums than most other bands I can think of and great showmen. I wish there was a place for their sort of music in this day and age of crappy hip hop and sludge metal and awful American Idol style pop but there doesn't seem to be anymore.