Just read: A Cook's Tour, by Anthony Bourdain. You may recognize the guy on the cover as the cranky host of the television program by the same name on the Food Network. Capitalizing on the unexpected success of his previous book, Kitchen Confidential, he decided to take a year off from his day job as the executive chef at brasserie Les Halles in New York and bum his way around the planet, in search of the perfect meal. He eats whole roasted lamb in the Moroccan desert, iguana tamales in Mexico, and still-beating cobra heart in Vietnam, and unlike your normal TV chef, who's never met a local dish he doesn't wax poetic about (because that's what the tourist board is paying him to do), Mr. Bourdain is brutally honest about what's good and what's bad along the way. I was surprised to find that his writing style is just as engaging and witty - if not more so - than his on-screen patter and voice-over commentary, and of course even cable television has to leave out all the best parts of a trip like this, such as his page-long rants about politics, corporate culture, and the other Food Network celebrities. If you love food, you'll be salivating the whole way through, but especially so during his stay in Vietnam, where you can close your eyes and stumble into the best meal of your life. Upon finishing the book, I had no choice but to hole myself up in the kitchen and cook up a batch of pho - the beef and noodle soup that is the specialty of Hanoi and considered the unofficial national dish of the Vietnamese people - for the wife and me. Though I'm sure it was a pale imitation of what you can get over there, sipping the spicy, beefy, limey broth made us think of warmer climes and fabulous future culinary escapades.

Just started: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King. Mr. King often gets pooh-poohed by the reigning literati, I'm guessing more out of jealousy of his sales than for any bonafide critical reason, because he writes in a clear and unassuming style that most aspiring authors spend years and countless dollars in writing schools to attain. You may quibble with the subject matter (although I don't - I believe Stephen King is one of the few legimitate heirs to a rich American storytelling tradition whose practitioners have included Hawthorne and Poe, as well as many, many other less-known authors such as H.P. Lovecraft), but even if you do, you owe it to yourself to read some of the man's short stories and see if you don't have at least a minor change of heart.