​You're only two pages in when Jean-Marie Gallois, the hero of Idwal Jones' 1945 novel High Bonnet: A Novel of Epicurean Adventures, is seduced away from a life at sea and into a life spent behind the stoves. Blame it on the peddler traversing the Toulon wharf with a basket of medlars on his head. "The wind came laden with the odor of them," Jones writes, "and I thought of the medlar tree in my uncle's garden and fell a-longing."

The next minute, young Jean-Marie is lustily eating medlars, a skill unto itself:

"You pinch off the bud, gouge down the seeds, then tear away the peel and pop the medlar into your mouth. The three lucent seeds drop out easily like bullets. And you wash the pulp down with a gulp of Muscatel that bears the Tuscan mark on a black label."

By the time he has finished the fruit -- and a restaurant meal that costs a month's wages -- the ship has sailed, and Jean-Marie sets off on his real adventure, working in a three-star restaurant. The title of the first chapter couldn't be more clear in apportioning blame: "It Was the Medlars."

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jacromer

​Former President Bill Clinton, one of our featured famous vegans, is making quite a name for himself in world of diet books. According to Time magazine, he's attached his name to three diet-related books since losing 24 pounds on a vegan plan he adopted before Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010. Though he's written his fair share of books (his latest, Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy, hit shelves on Nov. 8), Clinton has yet to delve into writing his own dietary literature. Instead, he's "blurbing" for books like Think and Grow Thin by Charles D'Angelo, a book offering an 88-day plan to "change your life."

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​There is so much we don't know about Icelandic crime-fiction writer Arnaldur Indriðason (including how to pronounce his last name). But Christmas is upon us and so it seemed like the perfect time to tear through his dark best-seller, Voices. In it, Indriðason's chief protagonist, Detective Erlendur, and his team investigate the pre-Yuletide murder of a part-time Santa Claus and hotel doorman found stabbed to death in his basement hotel room with his bright red Santa pants around his ankles.

One unexpectedly gripping part of Indriðason's Reykjavík-based series is that when you meet the Inspector in the first novel, Jar City, he is just a depressed, sad-eyed crime-solver with a pissed-off ex-wife and a junkie freeloader for a daughter. But in this installment of the Erlendur series, Indriðason offers up snippets from the intrepid detective's childhood that give context to his air of buzzkill.

Erlendur also spends a lot of time fantasizing about eating boiled smoked mutton. Which got us wondering, "Is this a special Icelandic Christmas dish?" Through the miracle of Facebook we reached out to a resident of Reykjavík, Skarphéðinn Guðmundsson, (who also goes by the more manageable, Skarpi) who was kind enough to answer our questions without once mocking our simpleton questions: "What is boiled smoked mutton?" "Is it a traditional Christmas food?" "What does it taste like?" "How is it served?"

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Inglewood Public Library

Christmas tree

​Everyone gets into the Yuletide spirit differently. In the case of Bri Webber, a library assistant at the Inglewood Public Library, her version of decorating for the holidays did not involve jingle bells, shiny ornaments or boughs of holly. Instead she created a Christmas tree out of many volumes of something called the N.U.C.

What is the N.U.C.? (No, it's not Curly's laugh. That's spelled nyuk .) Before the computer age, librarians used the National Union Catalog, these impressively bound books issued by the Library of Congress to search for cataloguing records for new titles being added to library collections, so they could order those little cards that provided you with the correct call number and subject heading so you could check out, among other things, cookbooks.

Which leads us to Volume 11 of the N.U.C. If we pulled it out of the carefully stacked tree configuration (which wouldn't be a very nice thing to do because the whole thing would topple like a cruel game of Jenga) and flipped to page 93 we would find the 7th edition of the Bluebird Circle Cookbook, published in Houston, Texas in 1968, but when first released in 1957 was called Blue Bird Circle Recipes, Library of Congress number, TX715.B648 1968, 237 pages.

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Foodforfel/Flickr

Mark Crick imagines Geoffrey Chaucer's version of an onion tart

​When it comes to celebrity cookbooks, we don't have a whole lot of great ones to choose from. But maybe that's more a function of who we consider celebrities these days: if our great writers cooked up food instead of plots, we might have headnotes more interesting than "You just need some good ingredients and a few simple recipes, maybe a couple of jokes, or a 'topic to dissect' at the table, the way they do at Nora Ephron's house."

To save us from the cookbook celebrities of the present, "literary ventriloquist" Mark Crick imagines cookbook celebrities of the past and applies the style of great writers to the art of the cookbook. The Guardian recently excerpted three choice recipes from his book, The Household Tips of Great Writers, which includes Crick-as-Virginia Woolf interior monologuing her way through a Clafoutis Grandmère.

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Courtesy J. Wilson.

​J. Wilson, the man who survived on beer for 46 days, has lived to tell the tale -- in book format, naturally.

When we spoke with Wilson back in April (Part 1, Part 2), he was in the midst of his Lenten fast, subsisting on nothing but water and rich, malty doppelbock, a style of beer developed by the monks of Neudeck ob der Au. The story is strange enough. It gets stranger when you know that Wilson isn't even a Catholic. Then again, this wasn't a quest undertaken for the gluttonous shock value (30 Burgers... cough, cough) but an act of intellectual curiosity, a test of willpower and a spiritual exercise.

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amazon

​In My Last Supper: The Next Course, author Melanie Dunea's sequel to her first book by the same name, the pedigreed photographer rounds up a new crew of 50 high-profile chefs and includes a recipe from each in the book's appendix.

The main draw here is the same as in her first edition: Stunning, large-format photos presented in her attention-grabbing style. (It's nearly impossible to beat the photos in her first book, like this shot of a naked Anthony Bourdain).

This somewhat toned-down edition makes a great holiday gift for either the estate lawyer or the chef-obsessed food groupie on your list.

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​
Anthony Bourdain can now add yet another title to the long list of those he has already: chef, crime novelist, non-fiction author, television host, HBO writer, and eater of odd foods. No, not political candidate, but publisher. Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, today announced that Bourdain will soon have his own line of books, and will publish between three and five titles a year.

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Guzzle & Nosh

The ultimate cheese plate from the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills.

​Never let it be said that the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills doesn't know how to put out a cheese plate. Last night's launch party for Menu Design in America: A Visual and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design, 1850-1985, one of our favorite food-themed coffee table books in the last few years (and probably more appropriate than Taschen's La Petite Mort, then again that may depend on your social circle), featured an array of cheeses that tasted almost as stunning as they looked, splayed before a carved out wheel of parmesan.

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​You can add Stir It Up to the burgeoning category of "food literature," for lack of a better term. Only here, the audience is much younger than that 20-something blog memoir fan. Which is why it works.

Food novels, it seem, are much easier to pull off when the average age of your audience hovers around the 11-years-old and counting mark. That author Ramin Ganeshram is a seasoned food journalist probably has something to do with it.

Stir It Up also has a few recipes tossed into the mix -- a nice touch for the tween set. Chapter four, "Possibilities," ends with a recipe for "easy" curry chicken; a coconut sweet bread recipe wraps up the chapter titled "Ambition" (Ganeshram specializes in the cuisine of Trinidad & Tobago).

The book revolves around Anjali Krishnan, a 13-year-old girl whose parents own a roti shop in Queens.

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