Books worth reading about Toronto have been published at a steady pace over the last few years, such that the prospective buyer now faces an array of quality titles to choose from. I've already covered some of these offerings in a top 10 list published in fall 2010, but there's plenty that have come to press since then and others that didn't, for whatever reason, make my initial cut.

As was the case with the last post, I've placed emphasis on recently published texts that are easy enough to find in local bookstores, and that generally won't break the bank. It is, after all, past the mid-point of December, and I hope this list might help out those looking to buy last-minute gifts for the Toronto-lover on their holiday list. So while William Dendy's Lost Toronto is required reading for the true Torontophile, I leave it off the list below because you'll have to hope to find it in a used bookstore or order it from a vintage bookseller online. Similarly, Eric Arthur's No Mean City, also a foundational Toronto text, is absent because it's become a bit more difficult to find of late and isn't cheap at $40+ for a trade paper back.

Here are eight books about Toronto worth reading.

On Monday evening, the Bluma Appel Salon at the Toronto Public Library played host to Jeffrey Eugenides, an influential Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist making his first appearance to Toronto. Connected to the hysterical realism movement of writers like his Brown University classmate Rick Moody, friend Jonathan Franzen and the late David Foster Wallace, Eugenides is known for his 1993 book The Virgin Suicides (later adapted into a film by Sofia Coppola) and 2002's Middlesex, which won him a Pulitzer and a place in Oprah's Book Club.

Although it'd get some steep competition from the Historical Atlas of Toronto, Mark Osbaldeston's Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been is probably the most fascinating book about this city to be released in the last 10 years. It's one of those texts that I've had occasion to refer to more times than I can remember. As a history of projects that never came to fruition, it offers rare insight into the various decisions and political processes that have determined the shape of our city — for better and worse.

A collection of essays in honour of Jack Layton's life has just been released as an e-book, available for those with a Kindle, Kobo or Sony Reader. Composed of contributions from Stephen Lewis, David Miller, Steven Page, Rex Murphy, Tzeporah Berman, and Pierre-Luc Dusseault amongst others, Hope Is Better Than Fear: Paying Jack Layton Forward celebrates Layton's life and political activism by asking how those who have survived him can continue to do the work that he started.

Christopher Heard remembers the day when he sat in the lobby of the Royal York hotel with his father, waiting for a train to Montreal departing from Union Station, across Front Street. "I told him, 'I'd like to live in this place. I'd like to come here one day and just not leave.'"

The Toronto Review of Books went live earlier today, though the first thing that prospective readers will want to know is that literary affairs will serve as the starting point for the publication rather than as its sole focus. Launched as an online quarterly, the TRB promises to bring a critical sensibility to wide array of cultural productions that catch the eye of its contributors, which based on the first issue will include such things as books, e-books, websites, poetry, film and social media (and I'm quite sure a lot more).