Willa Wants To Read... Books About Cakes!

The other day my boyfriend and I went for a real afternoon tea at the wonderful Hotel Ritz in London. It was a fantastic experience and if you are ever a tourist in London (or living here but haven't tried it yet), you should give yourself that experience. It is expensive but it is also something that you won't forget!

Though I am not a big baker, having delicious, artistic cakes made me want to start baking and experimenting with the art of decorating and creating pastries, petit fours and other lovely, scrumptious cakes. And of course that made me want to buy cook books...

Ladurée. The Recipes. By Phillippe Andrieu and Sophie Tramier
Haven't tried a French macaron? Laduree are the masters of the macaron and I would love to have their recipe book on my shelf!

The Vintage Tea Party Book by Angel Adoree
Written by a gorgeous woman (check out her website - angeladoree.co.uk) who even lives in my part of London (East) and full of sweet recipes, this is the ultimately stylish afternoon tea book. This one is definitely on my wish list and the perfect present for a girl who likes to cook!

The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days: Recipes to make every day special by Tarek Malouf
Cake recipes to make every day special. What more do you need to know? And if this doesn't convince you, the cover will, it looks absolutely delicious!!

Willa wants to Read... The book behind the film

So I've seen the film (not knowing that there was a book behind it) and now I want to read the book because as we all know: usually the book is much better than the film :-)

Which books-made-into-films can you recommend?

"Whip It" by Shauna Cross
The film starring Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore (who is also the director) is full of great girlpower girls who rollerskates in derbys that are something of a rollerskating meets fight club thing. Full of cool clothes, great music and fun moments! I have already seen it twice and I absolutely have to read the book.
From amazon.com: Meet Bliss Cavendar, an indie-rock-loving misfit stuck in the tiny town of Bodeen, Texas. Her pageant-addicted mother expects her to compete for the coveted Miss Bluebonnet crown, but Bliss would rather feast on roaches than be subjected to such rhinestone tyranny. Bliss’s escape? Roller Derby. When she discovers a league in nearby Austin, Bliss embarks on an epic journey full of hilarious tattooed girls, delicious boys in bands, and a few not-so-awesome realities even the most hard-core derby chick has to learn.

"The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis
I know, I know... I really should have read this one before watching the movie. Sorry.
From amazon.com: Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are evacuated to a house during the war wherein lives a vague professor. Left much to their own devices, they find a way into another world - Narnia - and discover Aslan, the lion king in hiding.

"Thank You for Smoking" by Christopher Buckley
Great movie - heard the book is fun. From amazon.com: "Nick Naylor had been called most things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan." So begins the adventures of this protagonist, a shamelessly slimy yuppie and PR flack par excellence for the tobacco industry. The story, such as it is, consists of Naylor's attempts to prop up his failing corporate star by expanding his defense of the evil weed. Working the airwaves, he engineers successful, hysterical appearances on Oprah and Larry King , after which he's kidnapped by anti-tobacco terrorists who attempt to murder him by plastering his body with nicotine patches.

Willa wants to Read... Great American Literature!

I am sure you know the feeling that there are books that we really should have read but that we haven't managed to read yet. Those ones that are on the top of the TBR... My TBR seems to have quite a lot of those Great American Novels on it. Not sure why but they seem to pile up on the TBR without ever getting read by me... So here is a little list to remind myself that I need to set time aside to read them.
If you have read any of them and can recommend them, please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the book in question.

"A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway
From amazon.com: In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. In an unforgettable depiction of war, Hemingway recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteers and the men and women he encounters along the way with conviction and brutal honesty. A love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion, A Farewell to Arms is a testament to Hemingway's unique and unflinching view of the world and the people around him.

"To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf
From Wikipedia: A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centring on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skilfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration.



"Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates
From amazon.com: Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.

Willa Wants to Read... Books about bankers

I know, I know. Seems like a random subject doesn't it? Not only random but also weird and - at best - niche. However, it just so happens that my boyfriend is a banker so of course I am interested in the subject and the species of the banker. My favourite banker-book (I bet you didn't know that that is a genre, did you?) is "The Bonfire of Vanities" by Tom Wolfe which is spectacularly long but also really good if you ask me and "Liars Poker" by Michael Lewis is another chillingly great book from the world that brough you "Wall Street".
However, there are quite a few banker books that I still want to read and these are on the top of my list.

"Cityboy - Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile" by Geraint Anderson
From amazon.com: 'Who is Cityboy? He’s every brash, suited, FT-carrying idiot who ever pushed past you on the tube. He’s the egotistical buffoon who loudly brags about how much cash he’s made on the market at otherwise pleasant dinner parties. He’s the greedy, ruthless wanker whose actions are helping turn this world into the shit-hole it’s rapidly becoming. For one period in my life, he was me.'

In this no-holds-barred, warts-and-all account of life in London’s financial heartland, Cityboy breaks the Square Mile’s code of silence in his own inimitable style, revealing explosive secrets, tricks of the trade and the corrupt, murky underbelly at the heart of life in the City.

"The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine" by Michael Lewis
From amazon.com: Michael Lewis has written from the perspective of a financial insider for more than 20 years. His first book, Liar's Poker, was a warts-and-all account of Wall Street culture in the 1980s, when Lewis worked at the investment bank Salomon Brothers. Everything Lewis has touched since has turned to gold, and The Big Short seems to be another of those books, combining an incendiary, timely topic with the author's solid, insightful, and witty investigative reporting.

"Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves" by Andrew Ross Sorkin
From amazon.com: Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world’s economy.

Do you have any banker or banking books you can recommend?

Willa Wants to Read... Exotic cookbooks!

I do like a good book about cooking- I LOVE cooking and I love to read cookbooks to get inspiration. These are some of the wonderful books about food, lovely, delicious food, that I have on my TBR and that I really want to read. And they are all about exotic and exciting kitchens!

The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden. Because I have absolutely no knowledge about the Jewish kitchen but after visiting the Jewish Museum in Berlin a few months ago, I really want to learn more about traditional Jewish cooking.



Thai Food by David Thompson includes a large range of Thai recipes from all over that country. I will be going to Thailand in a month's time and I imagine that when I get back I will be full of foodie inspiration and wanting to try my hand at cooking lots of Thai recipes. I've heard that this book has all the information needed to get started so it is definitely on my TBR list!



Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible by Madhur Jaffrey. I guess the title says it all: a great guide to cooking curry. Up here in Scandiland there is nothing better than a curry to banish the cold. So I really want to learn more about curries so that when next winter comes, I will be able to cook up an Indian feast for the taste buds.



Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlo. There is no such thing as a good Chinese restaurant in this city where I live. Lots and lots of bad ones but not one decent one. If you ever want really beautiful Chinese food, try Hakkasan in London. For now, I will have to make do with cooking my own Chinese dishes and what better way to get inspired than to read Sichuan Cookery?



What are your favourite cookbooks?

Willa Wants to Read... Books about books!

We all do it sometimes - read books about books. Because when you are addicted to reading and addicted to fiction, it is so inspiring to read about books and get ideas for new adventures into unchartered territory.

Here are a couple of books about books that I really want to read. Can we call it meta-reading, I wonder?

Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks,
From guardian.co.uk:
"Faulks on Fiction romps through novels, providing plot summaries based on chosen characters. Avoiding anxiety about what a "character" is or about treating literary fictions as real (and rather modern) human beings, Faulks categorises into heroes, villains, snobs and lovers. These he calls "living people created in the minds of others"; he will, as it were, act as a midwife to them, for us."
Sounds delicious doesn't it? I had read the books from which most of these characters are taken, so reading this one will be more about revisiting happy memories of the characters than about getting inspired to do new reading. Nonetheless, this one is on my TBR and I predict it will land in my mailbox soon.

At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries by Estelle Ellis
One of the things I dream about having when I get a house of my own is a library. I love being surrounded by books, looking lovingly at the spines, dusting them. Taking one down and reading a few passages. Putting it back again. Picking out an old favourite. Sounds like heaven, doesn't it?

Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
From amazon.co.uk:
"Novelist Schwartz (Disturbances in the Field) learned to read at the age of three, encouraged by parents whom she describes as "people of the book." As a seven-year-old, she was reading every book in her Brooklyn home and remembers being captivated by classics from the Little Leather Library such as "The Little Mermaid," from Andersen's fairy tales; Edward Everett Hale's The Man Without a Country; and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In this thought-provoking essay, Schwartz links her sense of self to what she has read over a lifetime. Although she acknowledges that literature has not transformed her life or taught her how to live, reading, to Schwartz, is a pure activity that has made her receptive to the ideas of authors who have enlarged her vision of the world. So intimate is the connection between Schwartz and books that have made an impact upon her emotionally that she cannot bear to see the film version, for example, of A Little Princess, because she does not want to see the author's words transformed visually. Author tour."
Sounds fun I think though I haven't heard about this author before. I absolutely looooove the title!

So have you read any books about books that you can recommend?

Willa Wants to Read... Mediterranean Masterpieces!

I will be starting a new string of posts called Willa Wants to Read... and basically these posts will be about my very extensive To-Be-Read list. I have a long list - we are talking pages and pages of titles writing in times new roman size 12. I am hoping that blogging about some of these titles will make it a little bit easier for me to decide which ones to start with.. Hopefully. Do you know that feeling you get when you have to make a choice but have a lot to choice from? Like way way to much to choose from? That is how I feel when I try to decide which books from my TBR to read. I know it will take me years to get through all of them so how do I decide which ones I want to read now?
Hopefully these posts will be a helping hand.

Willa Wants to Read... mediterranean masterpieces!

"The Leopard" by Guiseppe di Lampedusa
Lampedusa's The Leopard is a classic - a novel that has also been made into a movie masterpiece. It is set in an Italy where the winds of change are blowing. It is set in Sicily just before Garibaldi began his work to unite Italy and the main character is an elderly aristocratic gentleman who must faces that times are changing and that his values may not have a place in the new world.

"If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi
This novel describes the years that the Italian-Jewish author spent in German concentration camp Auschwitz during WWII. The novel is famed for being a masterpiece in literature and for dealing with the exceedingly difficult subject in an honest way in a gripping prose.

"In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust
This colossal literary masterpiece totals 3200 pages! That is a lot, more than a lot really. It is seven volumes and I think that I will (at some point) start out slowly with the first one and see how it goes. I quote from amazon.com:
"As it forms the self-contained story of Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Crécy and is relatively short, it is generally considered a good introduction to the work and is often a set text in French schools."

What's on your TBR?