Stanley Tucci Bestselling 3 Books Collection - Taste: My Life Through Food, What I Ate in One Year (and related thoughts), The Tucci Table: Cooking With Family and Friends

Why it's worth it

Three Stanley Tucci books in one purchase: the food memoir Taste, the diary-style What I Ate in One Year, and the family cookbook The Tucci Table. Together they cover his eating life from essay to recipe, which makes this the easiest gift in the guide.

This is Tucci's food writing in one go. Taste is the memoir that established him as a real writer about eating rather than a celebrity with opinions. What I Ate in One Year is the diary. The Tucci Table is the family cookbook. Read in that order, each one fills in what the last one left out.

The diary is the best of the three. A year of meals, trips, small domestic disasters and the occasional bleak day is a strange structure for a memoir, and it works anyway. It's the most personal thing he's written. It's also the one you'll actually reread, which recipe collections rarely manage.

From our review of 6 memoirs and autobiographies, by Genevieve Dubois, Home & Living Expert

What we like

• +This is Tucci's food writing in one go
• +The diary is the best of the three
• +The cookbook makes the memoir useful
• +It's the easiest gift here

What to know

• –It's the most expensive item in this guide
• –Check your shelf first
• –The mix isn't all memoir