Abbie's Real Life Blog

I finished Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential book last night, and I enjoyed it.  I still think he’s a bit of an egotist, full of insecurity and bravado, but generally I enjoyed his depiction of the restaurant world pre-2000.  Sure, he’s got some sort of major problem with vegetarians, but I sincerely do not care what he thinks of my diet.  I know what’s good for me, and he knows what’s good for him, and let’s just call it a day on that, ok?

However, I was watching the No Reservations Uzbekistan episode last night, and I was thinking that what the Travel Channel really needs is a female version of Anthony Bourdain (ballsy and funny, but without the insecurity and bravado) who could do a show about traveling to Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries and talk about traveling as a woman.  Bourdain commented a little on the Uzbek culture, but he didn’t really delve into it.  I want to see what the country is really like, because I want to think that someday I will be able to travel there, and I want a sense of what it would be like to travel alone there as a woman.  I get the sense of it when I watch Bourdain, except in places where I think my gender would be a liability.  What the Travel Channel does NOT need is more Samantha Brown.  I am not a fan of Samantha Brown.  Who travels like that?  I do not care to see video of the fancy hotels.  It is boring.  She bores me.  Stop playing those damn commercials for her new show about weekend vacations.  They are insipid.

I also read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer on the way home from Anaheim.

This is how stupid I am.  I go to a library conference, where publishers bring boxes of books to show off their new catalogue to collections development librarians, and then they put them on big-time sale at the end of the conference.  You can walk away with brand-new hardbacks for $5 each, easily.  The problem is that you then have to get all of those books home again, and I am not a light packer, so I never have room, and I never buy any, even though they’re so cheap.

But what do I do?  I browse around the stupid airport bookstore and buy one there for $15, because I am some kind of idiot lunatic.

Anyway, I haven’t seen the movie, and knew next to nothing about the story, but thought it was a pretty good book.  In the forward, the author delves into the controversy that surrounds the story of the kid who walks into the Alaskan woods sans survival skills or a decent amount of food, and then starves to death.  (Err, spoiler!!)  It was also a fast read.  I read it all on the plane home.  Which makes it not really worth $15, but whatever.

I need to go through my books and start giving some of them away, especially these $15 pop lit books that I will never read again.  Forcing them on family members, leaving them on park benches.  $15 for a CD that I will listen to endlessly or a movie that I will rewatch over and over, this makes sense, but $15 for a book that I’ll finish in a few hours, stick in a bookshelf, and then leave to gather dust is just dumbassery.

Seriously, I am the worst librarian in the history of libraries.