Dwight Garner has a great cookbook roundup in the NY Times Book Review this week, in which he wonders why British cookbooks are better than American ones (they’re “smaller, more soulful and more idiosyncratic than their American counterparts. They’re the products of a vision one is tempted to call novelistic. Drollery and lack of pretension, as in the novels of Waugh and Wodehouse, are prized. The emotional climate is pleasantly autumnal. These writers like to talk about the best things to eat when you’re feeling a bit depressed or bewildered.”). He goes on to rave about Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stores, now available for the first time in the US, and to chide Alice Waters for the cool tone of her The Art of Simple Food, calling it a “Hillary Clinton of a cookbook, brilliant but unflappable and thus slightly unapproachable.” It’s a great piece of writing and also, yes, full of good gift ideas.

And while you’re perusing the book review, don’t miss Robin Henig’s review of David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots.

Humans, Levy writes, are hard-wired to impute emotions onto anything with which we’re in intimate contact, to feel love for objects both animate and inanimate. And robots, he argues, might turn out to be even more lovable than some humans.”By 2025 “at the latest,” he predicts, “artificial-emotion technologies” will allow robots to be more emotionally available than the typical American human male.”

I’d do him.