Reading is almost as good as eating

I've been on a huge reading-about-food binge of late. If you were to peruse the list of books (and magazines) I've borrowed from the Toronto Public Library over the last six months, you'd think I'd abandoned fiction altogether (not true).

The three best* non-fiction titles I've come across this year are (in the order I read them):

• Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
  
• The 100-Mile Diet by Alissa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
• Julie and Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny kitchen by Julie Powell**

* By "best," I mean most interesting and best-written. Cookbooks don't count, though if they did honorable mentions would go to Raw by Charlie Trotter (in which the photos are amazing; I haven't actually made anything from the book) and Fresh Food Fast: Delicious, Seasonal Vegetarian Meals in Under an Hour by Peter Berley (again, haven't made anything from this book but I was flagging so many recipes to photocopy when I was reading it that I think I have to buy the book).

**Related to the last title, which is all about cooking EVERY SINGLE RECIPE in Julia Child's infamous Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I just stumbled across the Smithsonian Museum of American History's online exhibit of Julia Child's kitchen. It's fascinating and worth checking out (especially since the museum itself is closed for renovations until 2008).