I love food. When going over our vacation pictures, I was amused to find that many of them are simply us eating something amazing. These are the memories we want to cherish, and hopefully relive.

So when you add food to books, I get excited. And I don't just mean cookbooks, although those are definitely good, too. (My favorite kind are the ones that focus on one particular food, cooked in an obscene number of ways. That's imagination, my friends.)

And so I'm thrilled about the trend in modern literature to focus not just on what the characters in a given story are saying, thinking and feeling, but the things they choose to eat -- and how that moves the story and the characters forward.

An April New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik sums up the trend nicely: "Cooking is to our literature what sex was to the writing of the sixties and seventies, the thing worth stopping the story for to share, so to speak, with the reader." No longer are authors dawdling over bedroom scenes or sweeping landscapes; it's the kitchen that interests them.

I adore tomes like The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and Salt: A World History, probably because I'm also a huge history nerd. And the search for Marcel Proust's beloved madeleines both amused and intrigued me. What books get you salvating?