Having watched Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" before, grudgingly, and not having been a big fan of his ... we'll say "abrasive" personality, I was a bit wary about my level of enjoyment for reading "The Nasty Bits". But I'm in the middle of writing my own book about food, so I thought reading the writing of someone who knew food intimately, someone who has given his life to understanding and explaining food as a sensory experience and cultural metaphor, could only be a good idea for my own writing, stylistically, so I jumped in.

And immediately, with just the preface to the book, I was hooked. Bourdain jumps right in with an imagistic account of a valuable cultural experience, sets the scene, a classic writer's move. By the time I got to the second page and to his question "How do I make that beautiful?" I knew I was reading a fellow writer, someone grappling with the larger difficulties of putting experience to page. I thought the rest of the book was an up-and-down journey of that idea.

Sure, Bourdain's fuck-you style came out at times, but even then I found I enjoyed it more than on TV, as I could see he was using anger for a specific stylistic purpose, dropping short rants like "The Food Terrorists" in among flowery odes like "My Manhattan" or "Sleaze Gone By" (very different views on the same topic, which I loved). I tolerated the rage because it was well-paced throughout the book and provided structural variety.

Overall, I'd be more interested now in reading some full-length Bourdain, where he might be able to more deeply explore some of the complex issues raised in shorts here--his ideas on vegetarianism or the raw food movement, for example--but this was a fly-through book, and pretty nice on the ears.