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?