high gloss; Nothing spruces up the season like a lavish, well-chosen gift book.(Recommended readings)

Byline: Megan O'grady

Topping stylish wish lists everywhere is our own Hamish Bowles's Vogue Living: Houses, Gardens, People (Knopf), a collection of unforgettable interiors drawn from this magazine's pages, from Sofia Coppola's Los Feliz bungalow with a view to Karl Lagerfeld's opulent eighteenth-century ch,teaux. Penned by the granddaughter of the original owners and photographed by Francois Halard, Dominique Vellay's La Maison de Verre: Pierre Chareau's Modernist Masterwork (Thames & Hudson) preserves the iconic, recently sold glass-block home for posterity. Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle (Frances Lincoln), by Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi, marks the long-awaited restoration of Walpole's "little plaything house," the inspiration for his genre-making Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.

Few gifts shine more brightly than a beautifully presented monograph. The gilt-spined, large-format Klimt (Prestel), edited by Alfred Weidinger, encompasses the Viennese Art Nouveau master's luminous oeuvre, with such highlights as frescoes recently uncovered in a church in Istria and the contentious Bloch-Bauer portraits. Equally alluring is Sabine Rewald's Balthus: Time Suspended (Schirmer/Mosel), which probes the dreamily unsettling work of one of the twentieth century's most mysterious painters. Almost as monumental as its subject, Michelangelo (Taschen), by Thomas Popper, Frank Zollner, and Christof Thoenes, presents the celestially inspired polymath on a grand scale, while earthier tastes might prefer Germano Celant's Rotella (Skira), commemorating the Italian Nouveau Realiste and his riotously colored collages.

This season's best photography books pack an emotional as well as a visual punch. Richard Sexton's Terra Incognita: Photographs of America's Third Coast (Chronicle Books) captures, in haunting black-and-white images, a bayou landscape both evocative and fragile. Magnum Magnum (Thames & Hudson) encompasses 60 years of photography by the legendary agency, including Eve Arnold's candid shot of a young Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Capa's close-ups of wartime Catalonia. And the ultimate in collectible nostalgia, New York (Gloria) is a limited-edition tribute to the city-with images by the likes of Stieglitz and Leibovitz, as well as contributions by Gotham writers past and present-bound in silk and encased in a Lucite tower.

Guaranteed to be devoured is this year's best culinary memoir, Judith Jones's The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (Knopf), the story of the influential editor's gastronomic awakening in (where else?) Paris. Spain and Italy are highlighted in two winningly heartfelt cookbooks: a whimsically illustrated edition of Simone Ortega's 1080 Recipes (Phaidon), the so-called Spanish Joy of Cooking, at long last translated into English, and Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy: Food and Stories (Ecco), in which London's favorite Italian chef recounts such elemental pleasures as risotto made with Barolo (and lots of it). The sweetest of indulgences can be found in Gail Monaghan's Lost Desserts: Delicious Indulgences of the Past (Rizzoli), from the gooey pleasures of Schrafft's Famous Butterscotch Sundae to the elegant biscuitry of the Vicomte de Mauduit's Neapolitan Cake, all photographed by Eric Boman. And facing one's mortality is positively sybaritic in Melanie Dunea's My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meal: Portraits, Interviews, and Recipes (Bloomsbury), thanks to which home cooks can retire to their graves having mastered Thomas Keller's Roast Chicken and Lidia Bastianich's Peach Granita.

Decadence isn't always of the edible sort. Bulgari (Abbeville), by Daniela Mascetti and Amanda Triossi, is a tantalizing showcase of more than 100 years' worth of the jewelry house's best, while The Shell: A World of Decoration and Ornament (Thames & Hudson), by Ingrid Thomas, finds this ...