Our friends at the James Beard Foundation recommended the “Best Books for the 14 Weeks of Summer,” (ranging from Memorial Day to Labor Day) in the July/August 2012 edition of JBF Events.

The 14 great reads designed for foodies run the gamut from memoirs to fiction, and even natural history. Writers are as current as Gabrielle Hamilton, or as venerated as A.J. Liebling and M.F.K. Fisher.

Selected by an array of culinary experts from the James Beard Foundation Book Awards Committee, this essential list was inspired by the popularity of the Book Committee’s 2010 “The Baker’s Dozen” list, a compilation of 13 essential baking books that spanned almost four decades, from 1973 to 2010.

Here are the 14 selected tomes:

1. The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher (John Wiley & Sons)

2. Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by A.J. Liebling (North Point Press)

3. Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House)

4. Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War by Annia Ciezadlo (Free Press)

5. A Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester (Picador)

6. An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler (Scribner)

7. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee (Twelve)

8. Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford (Vintage)

9. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin (Vintage)

10. The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten (Vintage)

11. Oranges by John McPhee (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

12. The Oysters of Locmariaquer by Eleanor Clark (Ecco Press)

13. Simple Cooking by John Thorne (North Point Press)

14. The Tummy Trilogy by Calvin Trillin (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

And please don’t forget to tuck a copy of my very own “Pike Place Public Market Seafood Cookbook,” into your beach bag, or read the new e-edition on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad.