In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating by Michael Pollan

Allen Lane, £16.99

Michael Pollan's mantra is: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He means stuff your great-grandmother would have recognised as food, not “edible foodlike substances” such as yoghurt squeezed from a tube. He takes issue with the imperfect science of “nutritionism”, an ideology “whipped up in tandem with the industrialisation of food”. He gives simple tips on eating well: avoid anything with additives you can't pronounce; you are what you eat eats too. Read this witty book, together with The Omnivore's Dilemma, for a healthier life and diet.

Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost by Tony Russell

OUP, £17.99

Not all country roads lead old-time musicians home, or to the Country & Western Hall of Fame. Their ghostly voices, played on friable old 78s, haunt the airwaves of country stations and their photos, in bad suits, big Stetsons and fringed dude ranch outfits, are freeze-dried in the decades from the 1920s to the 1940s. Tony Russell has shaken the dust from more than 100 old timers: you gotta love Hoyt Ming and his Pep Steppers, the Girls of the Golden West (Millie and Dolly Good), and the anti-communist Lulu Belle & Scotty.

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature by John Mullan

Faber, £17.99

It would be a foolish author and a brave publisher who nowadays opted to remain anonymous. Mullan lists three traditional motives: diffidence, fear of consequences and shame. Since modesty and embarrassment are not highly regarded in modern culture, and personal peril is probable only in extreme cases, the rare modern cases of anonymity are more likely to be shrewd marketing. Mullan admits that the ambiguity of “Anon” does not figure as a grand narrative, but his discussion of the competing interests of authors in maintaining anonymity, and the zeal of readers in outing them, is entertaining.

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