The good folks at Leite’s Culinaria have posted their list of the Best 20 Food Books of 2006. Topping the list is not a cookbook, but Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

“If you haven’t read it, do yourself the favor. It’s one of the most important food books to come along in memory. In it Pollan traces four meals back to their natural roots: a McDonald’s lunch eaten on the go, a meal made with ingredients from Whole Foods, a chicken dinner cooked with foods from a small über-organic Virginia farm, and a banquet comprised of items Pollan foraged and hunted. You’ll be fascinated, horrified, awestruck, and think twice about the foods you put in your body. Plus we guarantee you’ll never look at corn the same way again.”

I’m inclined to agree with their nomination; after all, I included it in the Culinary Lit gift guide. Pollan’s book is not only important and extremely edifying, but an outright enjoyable read. It will force you to see everything you eat in a new light. It will make you long for a pastoral farm where happy animals produce healthful food. And it will probably squelch any fantasies you’ve had about boar hunting. In any case, it will absolutely change the way you eat, or at least what you know about what you eat.

In August, we were loving illustrator Steve Mack’s blog project in which he created an illustration every week that corresponds with a letter in the alphabet.  The project was such a hit in the blogosphere, Steve decided to create a book.

This week, Steve announced the release of Steve Mack’s ABC Book - An Illustrated Compendium A through Z. And it couldn’t be cuter.

Says Steve, “I received my Authors copy earlier in the week and couldn’t be more pleased with the product. It was self published via Booksurge an Amazon company… I am so happy and pleased to be able to offer such a high quality reproduction of my illustrations. “ 

Buy his book today on Amazon. Yay Steve!!! 

It’s pouring rain here in LA, and it’s dumping snow on Buffalo, NY…guess the seasons have officially changed, which means cold and cozy weather is here for a bit.

With such rare cloud cover in LALA Land, the impulse to hole up with a good book and a great sweater pretty much takes over the city (plus, we could never dream of going out anywhere with wet hair!)

What book to choose? Ah, there are so many, and browsing through the blogosphere, I get the slight idea that people are curling up all over the US of A.

Good thing for us it just happens to be Slate Magazine’s Fall Fiction Week, and they have a lovely list of overlooked fiction recommended by bloggers and booksellers.

...continued: Books To Read

For those in need of a diet makeover, ThisNext is beginning to form a mini-library of healthy-eating books suited to many a food-focused goal. Whether you’re looking to drop a jeans size or incorporate more organic food into your meals, revamping your routine with the help of a new read can be one of the simplest ways to do good for your body, mind, and even the planet.

Take Jeff Cox’s Organic Cook’s Bible: How to Select and Cook the Best Ingredients on the Market, recommended by our recently interviewed shopcaster Fanny The Fairy. With 250 recipes using more than 150 organic ingredients, the book encourages readers to support Earth-friendly forms of food production and become more connected to what they’re consuming (“I love this book because i think it’s important to know the food you eat,” says Fanny in her shopcast).

With a similar emphasis on exploring organic foods – especially of the locally, sustainably grown variety – Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry’s Grub presents healthy eating as a form of activism. In her review at Fit Fare, Sara Maamouri dubs the book “a fired-up call to action” that teaches readers “exactly what they can do to change their food future,” while at the same time serving as “a reminder that ultimately, food should be a fun, creative part of our lives, and not simply a bland and boring fuel.”

...continued: Healthy reads

Prepping for a British Association of Snowsport Instructors course in Argentina this summer, Len Holgate - a skiing blogger who posts about his adventures in the French Alps at MegeveSki.com - picked up a copy of Ron LeMaster’s book The Skier’s Edge. Intended to help readers better grasp the “interaction between the skis and the snow,” the book is geared toward advanced skiiers who want to gain complete mastery of technique. Calling The Skier’s Edge “fascinating for someone like me who’s a real technical geek at heart,” Len says:

“The book focuses on discussing the physics and bio-mechanics of skiing and, in particular, how what you do on the skis works with, or against (!), the natural behaviour of the ski due to its shape, stiffness, etc…There’s lots of talk on “initial steering angles” and how to take control of the radius and line that you ski rather than simply riding the skis natural radius. Some of it’s pretty obvious but lots of it is less so and much is the kind of information that would take a long time to work out through trial and error alone.”

As one of the most popular rock-climbing spots in the country, West Virginia’s New River Gorge offers more than 1,400 climbs within its 63,000 acres. To learn your way around the highest among those climbs WiredNut.com (a primo resource for Mid-Atlantic climbing news) suggests checking out Eric Hörst’s newly updated Climbers’ Guide to Bubba City. As “the first climbing boomtown of the late 1980s new-route gold rush in the New River Gorge,” Bubba City’s got more than 175 sport routes. Among the most fantastically named: Bad-ass Tattoo, Skinhead Grin, Tongulation, and Reaches From Hell.

Even if neither nature writing nor noir writing is really your thing, it’s quite hard to resist the idea of a piece of nonfiction that one reviewer describes as either “John Muir at the crime scene or Elmore Leonard with a backpack.” At Nature Blog - a look at “nature, culture, dogs, environmental news, and writing with a Southern Rockies perspective” - Chas S. Clifton checks out Nature Noir, Jordan Fisher Smith’s memoir of his days as a California state park ranger. One very good reason to read, according to Chas:

“The bitter pill of environmental history goes down much more easily if you mix in meth dealers, tree thieves, feral gold prospectors, and suicial bridge-jumpers.”

Consider Nature Noir added to both my ThisNext and Amazon wishlists.

Literally Blogging is an intriguing blog which focuses on all things literary, with a focus on the Classics.  For those who shy away from the more erudite blogs out there, Literally Blogging is an easy to read and non-condescending look at the literary world.  It’s pretty fast-paced with posts on books, to authors, to reading-related news…like updates on Google Book Search:

In a partnership with the University of California, Harvard, the University of Michigan, Oxford and the New York Public Library, search engine giant Google launched a service today offering full downloads of out-of-copyright books in PDF format.

Google Book Search is initially offering a number of classics and some obscure titles that are already in the public domain.

…Among the books currently being offered are Dante’s Inferno, Aesop’s Fables and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Mr. Nice Guy of The Blogfathers doesn’t know quite what to make of the whole ‘tattoo’ thing…but he thinks about it long and hard in a recent post, prompted by the publication of a new book, Mommy Has Tattoos, and its companion piece, The Tattoo Coloring Book…which, he’s convinced, “encourages your 5-year-old to get a head start in considering which tattoo would be best for her: angel-slut wings on her shoulder blades or some Maori symbol, the meaning of which she will never quite get straight, on the inside of her ankle.”  He may not be far wrong: The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology reports that about 24 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 50 have at least one tattoo, up from about 15 percent in 2003, and 36 percent of those between 18 and 29 have a tattoo.

Is he pro or con tatts?  He admits, he’s not quite sure.  But he does seem to recall an excellent Life in Hell cartoon: “Two old fogies are sitting in a nursing home looking at each other. They’re heavily inked and pierced. One says to the other, ‘So I see you were stupid in the ‘90’s too.’”

Never mind that there are five trillion recipes on the Web (it’s true — count them!). Sometimes there is no replacement for the tactile pleasures of a good, old-fashioned cookbook. As far as I’m concerned, one of the greatest ways to blow a Sunday afternoon is thumbing through a good cookbook or ten, drooling over the pictures and dreaming up meals not yet cooked.

I’m glad to see I’m not alone. Cookbooks are a hot topic on ThisNext. Our users have picked dozens of them, ranging from the classic to the cutting-edge. Take, for example, The Joy of Cooking. So revered is this major oeuvre that six people have picked it; two — annhickey and our very own AuntBeep — call it out as their “bible.” Jolynnelockley calls it “a classic … what your mother told you and you forgot. It’s all there.” Caseyhavre refers to it as “the best basic book in the world of cooking.” Even ThisNext’s co-founder and “head nerd” cogg calls it “a must have.” And he’s a pretty smart guy, so you should listen to him.

...continued: (Cook)book'em, Danno