It's no secret that I am obsessed with Jonathan Gold. "Who the heck is Jonathan Gold?" some of you may be asking.

Don't worry, I'm not offended that you may not know. If you don't live to eat in Los Angeles, or maybe even New York, then you might not know him. Jonathan Gold is the current restaurant critic for the LA Weekly, and I will most certainly have you all know that I had a cybercrush on him waaaaay before he was even in the running for a Pulitzer Prize, let alone named the winner! Yes, yes, y'all, Mr Jonathan Gold is a Pulitzer prize-winning writer.

Some of the obsession has to do with what he writes about -- though he has dined around New York, he started in LA and makes his dining home here now. He also tends to focus his dining experiences on places that don't get written up by every other person on the planet.

However, the real reason I gush like I do about Mr. JGold is not his subject matter. It's his writing.

Yes, we are a food blog here at Slashfood, but I am not afraid to say that even if Jonathan Gold were writing about some other topic entirely -- the daily rise and fall of the stock market or perhaps the complete evolutionary history of the grasshopper -- I would still read it. That's how much I like it.

Ok, so a grasshopper is pretty interesting, so that wasn't fair.

This also means that even if you don't live in LA, it might still be worthwhile to pick up a copy of Mr JGold's Counter Intelligence, a sort of dining guide that is a showcase of some 200 reviews that were published previously in LA Weekly. You know how with most "dining guides" you only use the free copy that someone gave you (because you'd never actually buy one) every once in a while, if at all, and all you do is go straight to the index to find the restaurant, flip to the right page, and copy down the address? Counter Intelligence is not like that. It doesn't read like a story, but it does read like a collection of super short stories. I read it from cover to cover.

Yes, the book is slightly older - from 2000 -- but it's still worth reading just for, well, the reading, but you want to read it soon. I read a rumor somewhere that Mr JGold is going to be writing a new one!