Reddit mentions of The New Book of Middle Eastern Food: The Classic Cookbook, Expanded and Updated, with New Recipes and Contemporary Variations on Old Themes

Pick a classic in a cuisine with which you're generally unfamiliar but for which you feel confidant you can get good ingredients. A few ideas:

• Diana Kennedy - Essential Cuisines of Mexico or The Art of Mexican Cooking
  
  
• Barbara Tropp - The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking
  
  
• David Thompson - Thai Food
  
  
• Claudia Roden - The New Book of Middle Eastern Food
  
  
• Shizuo Tsuji - Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art
  
  You'll be forced to learn new techniques and deal with new ingredients, and get a sense of an entire cooking tradition. Any of those books will give you at least a small sense of the culture that inspired the cuisine, the human context, in addition to culinary knowledge.

As someone with too many cookbooks for her own good, here are some of my favorites.

I am not a vegetarian, but Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is the book that made me love vegetables. She doesn't approach vegetarian cooking in the way lots of people do, where you just substitute or omit meat from a dish, but creates recipes that center around and bring out the best from vegetables.

Gourmet Today is a huge book culled from the now-defunct Gourmet magazine. It's a good all-around resource with (as the title implies) a modern American bent to its recipes.

Steven Raichlen's How to Grill transformed me from a charcoal-shy indoors-only kind of cook into an aspiring grillmaster last summer. He lays the basics out in a very straightforward manner with lots of pictures and excellent recipes. It includes the basics of smoking as well.

I like reading cookbooks that blend recipes with a broader scope of information related to them, so I enjoy anything by Jennifer McLagan (I started with Odd Bits). She writes about ingredients that are less typical or even looked down upon, making the case that these are overlooked culinary treasures. Her chapter introductions include tidbits like history, cultural impact, and science behind the ingredients. The recipes are great but tend to be highly-involved.

For specific cuisines, a couple of my favorites are Bill Neal's Southern Cooking (the recipe for Shrimp & Grits is mind-blowingly good), The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and Madame Wong's Long-Life Chinese Cookbook.

TL;DR: the first three are what I'd consider must-haves, the remainder are interesting and might broaden your culinary horizons.

If you get into Indian or Middle Eastern cooking, you will find tons of recipes that are very light on the meat or have great veggie options that are still very filling and tasty. For a cookbook, my top recommendation is The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden - it uses a pretty set list of ingredients that unlike Indian food doesn't usually require you buy a lot of spices to get started. I don't think I've made anything from this that didn't turn out amazing.

There are plenty of variations and they all have their own names :P
This book is my bible: [Claudia Roden - New Book of Middle Eastern Food]
(http://www.amazon.com/New-Book-Middle-Eastern-Food/dp/0375405062/)