Kitchen Confidential, Deja Demon, Extras

I have three books to blog about today--not because I fell behind, but because I was reading two books at once, and then read Extras at the bookstore today.

Kitchen Confidential is that guy who wrote about why you shouldn't eat fish on a Monday and how restaurant workers say "fuck" a lot. Remember him? He made a big splash back when the book first came out. It was fairly OK--I think the author (Anthony Bourdain) is a little too in love with his own bad-boy, "Oh yeah, I cuss a lot, like knives, and did I mention I used to do heroin?" self-image. He professes in the introduction (new to the trade paperback edition, written after the hc was a smash success) that he was tewtally, tewtally shocked to have become famous for the book, but you can kind of tell he was sort of hoping for it. But I have such a knee-jerk hatred of pretentious assholes, that I think the fact that I read him as one says more about me than it does about the book. The guy really does care about food, which counts for a lot in my estimation. Many of the chapters read like magazine articles--the front matter doesn't say they were previously published, but they might be anyway. That would explain why he repeats himself so much (not just the heroin thing, although I swear he mentions that in every chapter). I did enjoy the chapter about eating in Tokyo, so I might give his next book, which seems to be about eating in various countries, a try. Although if he mentions how he used to do heroin more than once in the first 50 pages, I'm throwing it across the room. (Special note: if you click on the link above and act fast, you could buy my very own copy of this book! Exciting, huh? I will be happy to sign it for you.)

Next up, Deja Demon. This is the book I picked up to read some of whenever Mr. Bourdain got on my nerves too much. It's fourth in the series about Kate Conner, Demon Hunter. Kate lives in San Diablo, California, and--as her titles suggests--she fights demons. It sounds awfully derivative--and it is--but the author makes one relatively minor change that makes these novels read like something more than Buffy fanfiction with the serial numbers partially filed off. Kate is over thirty, so instead of fitting in fighting evil alongside high school, dates, and homework, Kate juggles fighting evil with running errands, keeping house, and throwing dinner parties to help her husband's political career. Instead of hiding her secret identity from her parents, she hides it from her husband and children. She did start demon-hunting as a teen, but gave it up to start a family. That worked out for her for longer than you'd think (if you're at all genre-savvy), but when demons coincidentally (or not...) show up in the very town she chose to raise her family in, she has to pick up her old job. She resists the call, hoping to have a normal life with her husband and kids, but (here the genre-savvy will not be disappointed), eventually realizes that the world isn't going to save itself, and her husband and kids live in the world, so she doesn't have much of a choice.

By book four, she's assembled a multi-generational Scooby gang, including her best friend-slash-neighbor, an older demon-hunter who poses as her late husband's grandfather, the reincarnation of her late husband, and her own teenage daughter. (Her husband and toddler son are still in the dark about her activities.) In this installment, a demon she encountered in her past comes back to haunt her--this time, with zombies! In this series's mythology, zombies can be stopped only by dismembering them--but once dismembered, the individual parts remain mobile. This special feature is used both for drama (when a zombie hand tries to strangle Kate's daughter) and comedy (when a different zombie hand runs across the floor during a dinner party). Lots of zombies in this book.

Finally, Extras. YA novel. Extras is a--well, an extra, 4th book added on to Scott Westerfield's Uglies trilogy. Uglies is set in a near-future world where at age 16, everyone recieves cosmetic surgery to make them beautiful, and moves into a city where all the beautiful people have nothing to do but hang out, go to parties, and wear nice clothes. Oddly enough, the beautiful people also seem much more vapid and shallow than they were before their cosmetic surgery. What I thought was interesting about it was just how effective the setup is as an extended metaphor for smart pre-teens' hopes and fears about young adulthood. (Smart pre-teens, of course, are the audience for YA novels. Actual teenagers don't read them.) The Pretties have a glamourous lifestyle, unfettered by the rules that constrain the under-16 Uglies, but newly-minted Pretties become so wrapped up in this lifestyle that they lose all interest in friends who haven't turned 16 yet, and in the activities they once loved. Similarly, smart pre-teens in the real world may long for the freedom of slightly older siblings, but fear becoming boy-crazy and obsessed with appearance.

Of course, in the series, it's all a massive conspiracy. (Spoiler: the Prettifying operation also includes brain surgery to reduce imagination, motivation, and intelligence.) The main character (not-coincidentally, a 15 year old whose best friend has just turned 16) uncovers the conspiracy and reverses it.

Extras takes place a few years later, and has a new main character. She, too, is 15, and is stuck on the outskirts of the new system, where luxury goods and other perks are distributed based on popularity index (called "face rank" in the novel). She learns about an exciting and mysterious clique of girls who don't care about their popularity index, and--in keeping with the rest of the series--uncovers a massive conspiracy.

It's better than I'm making it sound. The setting is imaginative, and throughout the series, the characters' personalities and motivations are realistic.