This month's Storytellers Unplugged essay is up.

Happy New Year, folks. Enjoy.

After viewing multiple episodes in an insomnia-induced haze last night, it has become clear to me that the central message of Castle is very simple. Under no circumstances should you ever attempt to do the right thing or improve yourself, lest you be brutally murdered and dumped in a trash chute, a fountain, a tent, or some other, suitably unpleasant place to wind up dead.

That is all.

A quick caveat before the review itself. I have a strong bias towards cookbooks which teach it right, and against anything which hints at a sub-par version designed to be either quick or "for the home chef". Admittedly, I did just pick up a copy of Ad Hoc at Home, but (a) it was Thomas Keller (b) I could get it signed (c) it was Thomas Keller.

Momofoku is really two books in one. It is the story of David Chang's accidental restaurant empire, and the recipes that came from it. Both are compelling. If you have any interest at all in the restaurant business side of things, the book is well worth reading for that alone.

The recipes are from the restaurants. What that means is that they span the skill and equipment range from "have a sharp knife and cutting board, can chop" to "have access to Sous Vide equipment/can bone out a chicken and still have meat that is recognizable".

However, the accessible recipes are a delight -- the ginger-scallion sauce (included as an example at the Amazon page) is easy to make and wonderful to use, and the Momofoku signature Pork Buns are within the skill range of any home cook. And those two dishes alone would be worth the purchase price.

I'll let you know on the more difficult recipes later; and while I do have the equipment to cook Sous Vide (and have an experimental dish 36 hours into a 72 hour cooking cycle in now), you won't catch me trying any of the recipes that involve Transglutaminase. While I can think of all sorts of fun things to do with "meat glue", it is a powder that, in the presence of moisture, adheres proteins. Since my lungs are proteins in the presence of moisture, the stuff stays out of my kitchen.

TL;DR: Buy this book.

Question from a friend who is unlearned in the ways of the Red Sea Pedestrian: "My wife wants to know what Jewish people do on Christmas,

There are many things I love about working in the video game industry. Among them is the fact that, on any given day, I can walk through the halls of the office and hear someone say, in all seriousness, "Yes, please, go ahead and disembowel me."

I mean, when I was working for an executive outplacement firm, none of the disembowelings came with the word "please" attached. Well, not many of them, anyway.

....you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night, sitting bolt upright, and saying "Holy crap. The year's almost over and I'm three Dan Simmons doorstops behind!"

...you divide your book purchases not into fiction & non-fiction, but into Books To Keep In the Car, Books To Read On Planes, Books To Read In the Living Room, Books to Read In Bed, and Books To Read Anywhere Else You Can Find The Time

...you ask your lovely wife to load up a pile of books for you in her car for her cross-country drive, because you'll be meeting her on the back end and you want to read too many books this vacation to carry on the plane without adding an additional piece of luggage.

...you have more piles of books in your office than flat surfaces.

...you need another bookshelf in your closet for the books you are trying to get out of the house. There's about 130 of 'em.

...your "things to get done over the holidays" list consists mostly of book titles.

...you charted your year's reading and actually found the data interesting...

...you hate posting blog updates because you'd rather be reading.

Some books are best attacked when you can't sleep. Not because they'll put you out, but because sometimes the mindset insomnia engenders, that grim resolution that the night is counting down every single second by hand just to mess with you, is the absolutely perfect one for certain books. Sometimes they're ones you can't bring yourself ot read under normal circumstances; they require that 2 AM tight-jawed resolve to be appealing and appropriate. Sometimes they're ones whose subject matter just doesn't pack the same punch when there's light and movement around. And sometimes it's just the book that you started ages ago and never quite finished, and it tells you that if you polish it off, if you resolve that one tiny dangling loose end in your life, you'll sift enough peace of mind out of the deed to finally crawl back to bed and sleep. Don't believe the books that tell you that, incidentally. They lie. They have friends that want to be finished, too. And if you polish off one, says the man who killed two partially-reads this evening, all the rest will gang up on you and accuse you of playing favorites. Not fair, Black Glass. Not fair, The Outlaw Sea. I thought we had a deal.

In no particular order:

Living With the Dead, complete with instructions as to what to do the next time Darrell Schweitzer tries to sell you a book
Red Sky File, which got me funny looks on a plane from South Dakota
Legacy, which posits the question "What if your dad were really Batman, and he was kind of a dick?"

I'm putting the finishing touches on reviews of The Burning Skies (for Fantasy), and The Child Thief, John Dies at the End, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and Monster Republic #1 (for Green Man). There will be reading this week. And writing. And possibly cocktails.