These new books are all about books

• What's on your ideal bookshelf?
• Judging a book by its lover
• The world's great mystery novel?

Editor Thessaly La Force asked 106 creative people — including novelists Junot Diaz, Stephenie Meyer and Jennifer Egan, chef Alice Waters and musician/memoirists Patti Smith and Rosanne Cash — to share and describe the books that matter most to them, or, as La Force put it, "the books that have made you who you are today." The result, illustrated with Jane Mount's color paintings of book spines, is My Ideal Bookshelf (Little, Brown, to be released Nov. 13).

It's one of several new and forthcoming books about books. They include:

-- Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels,edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (Atria/Emily Bestler, in stores) includes recomendations from Lee Child (for Kenneth Orvis' The Damned and Destroyed), Jo Nesbo (for Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280) and Charlaine Harris (for Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male).

--Judging a Book By Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere by Lauren Leto (Harper Perennial, in stores) is both a parody and celebration of book culture.

-- Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet (Overlook, in stores) ponders how our personal libraries reveal our true nature.

-- One for the Books by Joe Queenan (Viking, out Oct. 29) examines the author's obsession with reading books, at least 100 a year, and often twice that number.