As I’ve mentioned before, I love to cook. I also love to read about cooking, and with Thanksgiving coming up food is definitely on my mind. So here are thirteen books that are fun to read—some of them include recipes, but not all. Most, however, include a lot of enthusiasm about food.

1. Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires. I’m a late addition to Reichl’s fan club, but I’m here to tell you the woman knows how to write about taste. This book is her account of her years as a restaurant critic at the New York Times and it’s both hilarious and touching (it tells you something about Reichl that she can actually be touching when she talks about food).

2. Jacques Pepin, The Apprentice, My Life In the Kitchen. Pepin’s account of his career as a chef—it’s unpretentious, funny, and endearing. Plus if you’ve ever wondered about the origin of the famous SNL sketch where Julia Child bleeds to death while pleading with us to “save the liver,” Pepin can tell you about it.

3. Jessica Harper, The Crabby Cook. Harper is one of those irritating people who’s had several successful careers—actress, children’s songwriter and singer, and now cookbook writer. Her account of cooking for her husband and two insanely picky children is hilarious, even if it does include dinners with Richard Gere.

4. Peg Bracken, The I Hate To Cook Book. A classic, recently reissued. Bracken doesn’t really hate to cook, but she has limited time to do it and she assumes you do too. If some of the recipes are a little dated, they’re still fun to read.

5. Jason Sheehan, Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen. If you’ve ever wondered how your food gets cooked and served in a restaurant, Sheehan will tell you—more, in fact, than you ever wanted to know.

6. Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential. I have a love-hate relationship with Bourdain, and frankly, it’s mostly hate (his disdain for home cooks as opposed to chefs rubs me the wrong way). But his accounts of how chefs work are fascinating, and in truth he’s almost (but not quite) as tough on himself as he is on Paula Deen.

7. Alton Brown, I’m Just Here For the Food. I’ve also got a love-hate relationship with Alton Brown, but here it’s mostly love. I enjoy Brown’s quirky approach to food science, but frankly I like reading about what he does more than using his recipes.

8. Lynn Rosetto Kasper and Sally Swift, How To Eat Supper. I love Kasper’s NPR show The Splendid Table, and this book has the same kind of well-informed but good-humored approach.

9. Christopher Kimball. The Kitchen Detective. You either enjoy Kimball (editor of both Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country and host of America’s Test Kitchen on PBS) or you find him insufferable. Most of the time I enjoy him, and The Kitchen Detective has all the kind of obsessive-compulsive approach to cooking that you get in his magazines.

10. David Zinczenko, Eat This, Not That 2012. Okay, I know, what’s this doing in a list with Jacques Pepin and Ruth Reichl? Zinczenko, like a lot of diet gurus, doesn’t seem to have much appreciation for the pleasures of food (although he’s very clear on the dangers). Still, I get a kick out of reading just how screwed up many fast food restaurants are, turning something as healthy as a chicken sandwich into a nightmare.

11. Julia Child, My Life In France. A wonderful portrait of Europe during the fifties and of Child’s coming of age as a chef while learning to cook. Generous, funny, and beautifully written, it’s a must for anybody who wants to see where the Julia sections of the movie Julie and Julia came from.

12. Bill Buford, Heat. If you’re an enthusiastic home cook, like me, and you’ve ever thought about apprenticing in a restaurant to improve your techniques, Buford’s book will cure you.

13. David Kamp, The United States of Arugula. I can’t imagine sitting down and reading this book straight through (the print is insanely small for one thing), but if you’re interested in the origins of the current mania for good food and good cooking, Kamp can tell you all about it—and he does.

So who did I miss? What food books are your favorites?