Reader’s Notebook, 3/10/26

I forgot one book in last week’s entry, then another I’m saving because I have a similar book in my queue and I want to write about them together. I hope no one minds that these books are not in the exact order I read them in.

The Anthony Bourdain Reader – Edited by Kimberly Witherspoon
One down side to reading primarily on a Kindle is I am never sure how long a book is when you begin. Oh, sure, there are page numbers. But you don’t know if there are a bunch of notes that take up the last 100 pages of a non-fiction work, or an excerpt from the author’s next book the comprise the final 20 pages of a novel. When I began this book and it told me it was a twelve hour read, I was a little surprised. Did Anthony Bourdain really write that much in his life? Surely there were notes that filled the final section.

Nope, this was all his writing. He indeed wrote a lot.

This is a collection of writings from all parts of his life, and from many different sources. Excerpts of the books he was most famous for – Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour – sections from novels he published, articles he wrote for magazines, comics he commissioned, hand written diary entries, a short play, and a TV script. Along with lots of other stuff.

And, to be honest, it was probably too much. This book would have been better digested in bits rather than working through the entire thing over a week. As much as I admired Bourdain and his work, he had a very specific writing style and after several hundred pages I needed a break.

If I owned this book, I likely would have set it aside for a bit and come back to it after finishing something else. Being a library book, I plowed through so the next person could get to it.

The good thing that came out of it is I’ve loaded up a bunch of his shows that made various Best Of Bourdain lists and have been working through those.

The Concrete River – John Shannon
Once again, I have forgotten what source provided me with a recommendation for this. I really need to save those so when I finally get to a book after it’s been on my list for a year or so, I can go back and see what it was that prompted me to add it to the queue.

This is the first book in Shannon’s Jack Liffey series, about an investigator with an aptitude for finding children who have gone missing in LA. In this case, the mother of a boy Liffey had found a year earlier has gone missing, and her family asks if he can take a look when the local police seem to blow them off. Liffey stumbles into something much bigger than simply a missing woman, as you do in books like this.

The story was published in the mid–90s, and takes place in that era LA, after the 1992 riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. So there’s a throw-back nature to it to begin with. Then Shannon writes it as an updated take on the hard-boiled, noir-ish mystery. There’s a weird combination of vibes because of that. That combination did not work for me. Some elements of the story seemed glossed over. And I hated how Shannon treated one of his main characters.

In other words, I won’t be reading any more books in the series.