2. What We Eat When We Eat Alone

A delightful little dessert of a book, this makes no pretense to being a scientific survey. Instead it muses, in a pleasant, rambling fashion that recalls the best after-dinner discussions, exactly on what the title says: the things we feed ourselves when there is no one else to take into account, and why. There are recipes, and many of them sound worth making, but this isn't really a cookbook, more a browsing book.