What's on your ideal food reading list?

While writing today's column about the new food-book reading club at Park Road Books, I was pondering the differences in food book styles.

There are cookbooks, and there are food books. Now, it is true that sometimes cookbooks can be food books. And sometimes food books have recipes. But there's an essential difference between the two. It seems to me that cookbooks are focused on how to make things. And food books are focused on . . . everything else.

Food memoirs. Food politics. Food novels. To me, Julia Child wrote cookbooks, and M.F.K. Fisher wrote food books.

I've offered plenty of cookbook lists through the years. Now I'm wondering: What five food books would be essential reading to you?

I'll start it off with two lists, mine and one sent to me by loyal and active food reader Ken Allen. My list:
A.J. Liebling, "Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris." One of the great -- and most humorous -- journalists writes about moving to Paris and learning to appreciate food in the 1920s. It's as much about learning how to eat as learning what to eat.
M.F.K. Fisher. Pretty much anything she wrote, although "The Art of Eating" is a good start.
John Thorne, "Simple Cooking." Erudite, curmudgeonly, comforting. Before any food blogger sets fingers on the keys, they ought to read the man who came before.
Laurie Colwin, "Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen" (and I'll cheat and add "More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen.") I wake up every morning knowing that the best food writing essays ever written have already been written. And yet I get up anyway.
Anthony Bourdain, "Kitchen Confidential." Before the show, before the wars on everyone from newspaper food editors to Esquire writer John Mariani and the James Beard Foundation, before the attitude became a schtick, Tony Bourdain was a writer. A good writer.

And from Ken Allen: I'm thinking of Cross Creek Cookery, Pat Conroy's cookbook, Dan Huntley's barbecue book, among others. If I'm making a recipe from one of those, I have to double the amount of time it takes to actually fix the food due to getting distracted by the stories.

Anyone else have picks they'd share?

Bourdain, Ripert, Park Road Books - and a food-writing club

You have to act fast (before 10 a.m. Friday, July 29), but Park Road Books has a special offer for tickets to "Good Vs. Evil: An Evening With Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert," which is coming to the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center on Oct. 26. If you buy tickets here through Park Road Book's deal, you can save $5. (After 10 a.m. tomorrow, you just buy them through the Blumenthal site at the regular prices, which range from $34.50 to $150. Go here.)

Park Road Books also will be the bookseller at the event, which is a nice perk for a great independent bookstore that has brought so many cookbook authors to town. (To read my colleague Pam Kelley's recent story on Park Road Books, go here.)

And in other cookbook author news, Rick McDaniel, the author of "An Irresistible History of Southern Food," will sign copies of his book at 3:30 p.m. Saturday at PRB. McDaniel was quoted in my recent story on pimento cheese. (And you can read that here.)

One more thing (I saved the best for last): Park Road Books is starting a food writing club to discuss great food writing of the book variety. The first meeting is at 7 p.m. Aug. 30 to discuss "Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge," by Edgar Gordon. What a cool idea.

Bourdain and Ripert: Together on stage

Chef Eric Ripert and professional mouth Tony Bourdain are coming to Charlotte on Oct. 26 with their stage show "Good Vs. Evil: An Evening With Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert," at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center.

Ripert is the chef of New York's famed restaurant Le Bernardin and the host of PBS's "Avec Eric." Bourdain, for the three people on the planet who haven't encountered him, is the host of Travel Channel's "No Reservations."

According to the Blumenthal, they will "share stories and muse on the place of food in our personal, community and global life." Tickets range from $34.50 to $150 for VIP packages and go on sale at 10 a.m. July 29, online at blumenthalarts.org, by calling 704-372-1000 or at the Blumenthal box office, 130 N. Tryon St.

So which one will play good and which will be evil? I can tell you that Ripert certainly has the nicer smile. And Bourdain certainly has the biggest . . . hmm. Let's just call it an ego.

Sorry, I'm struggling with what to say about Mr. Bourdain. He doesn't struggle with what to say about me and my profession. Back in March, he unleashed a diatribe on his blog in which he claimed that newspaper food editors spend all our time writing "kicky new muffin recipes."

Since I can only recall writing one muffin story in my life (back in the early 1990s, on how to make low-fat muffins that don't have the texture of rubber balls and certainly weren't kicky), I'm not sure how to welcome him to Charlotte. Perhaps I should send muffins.