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"Cake" by Malcolm Gladwell 

This is a book about having your cake, and the power and complexity of having your cake. We've always been taught that cake is for eating. "Eat your cake!", our mothers said to us, pushing slices of delicious Victoria Sponge down our throats. But counterintuitively, that might not be true.  Actually, in many exciting cases, having your cake is better.

Take the example of Jim-Bob Houlihan. Every day for forty years, he bought a cake from the bakery next to his house. His workmates thought he was crazy; he never ate them, and he doesn't even like cake. But when the bakery burned down, it was possible to reconstruct its valuable recipes from the museum of cakes, all stored in Jim-Bob's lever arch files. Now he's a billionaire and lives in a cake-shaped mansion in Beverly Hills. He has all the biscuits he can eat.

The idea for this book came to me when I was at a friend's wedding. I was given a slice of wedding cake and ate it. It was delicious! I particularly liked the marzipan. I love cake and eat it every time I get the chance.

But hang on, you might say - isn't that more of a story about eating your cake? I thought this was meant to be a book about having your cake, not eating it! Well, it's both. A lot of the time - even most of the time - eating your cake is a lot more sensible than having it. After all, what would you want to have a cake for, if not to eat it? And most cakes don't really store very well, so if you've had your cake for a while, you probably need to either eat it or throw it away.

So when I say that this is a book about how great it is to have your cake, I should probably say that it's about having your cake and eating it as well. Some people say that you can't have your cake and eat it. They're probably right. But have your cake, eat your cake - really the most interesting and vital issue here is that now you have to give me ten thousand dollars please.