Gift Guide 2018: Why Not a Book?

Too late to order by mail?  You can still support your local bookstore.  Lots of possibilities there. For an  Italian food lover, for example, you might put together a selection of regional recipe books, covering Tuscany, Rome, Puglia, Venice.  For those who are enamored of the food of the middle east there are a number of great new books on the market (there's always Ottolenghi, and I'm especially fond of Anissa Helou's new Feast) .

They can, of course, buy these books for themselves.  This book, however, is one that seems meant to be a gift.

I'm generally suspicious of coffee table gift books, but there's something so appealing about Let's Eat France!: 1,250 specialty foods, 375 iconic recipes, 350 topics, 260 personalities, plus hundreds of maps, charts, tricks, tips, and everything else you want to know about the food of France,  that I find myself unable to put it down.  I'm pretty sure that anyone who loves the food of France will feel the same way about this quirky compilation.  Weighing in at 6 pounds, it covers  everything from famous chefs to glassware, pasta, historical menus, writers

cheese, fruit, tripe

The book, in short, is everything a gift book should be: big, bold, unusual, fun - and not the sort of thing a person is likely to buy for herself.