7 Books That Are Actually Cake

If you'd ever tried to open them you'd know

Cake in the shape of an illuminated manuscript book
The Book of hours by the Master(s) of Zweder van Culemborg is cake. (Photo by Gregory Standaert)

Now that you’ve cut up every eggplant, lemon, pizza, and soap bottle in your house looking for hidden cakes, you may think you’re safe from the universal cakening. Bad news: many of the books hidden on your shelves are also cake. You didn’t know, because you haven’t read them. Nobody has. If they say they have, they’re lying, because if they’d read them, they’d know they are cake. The following books are cake and have always been cake.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty is cake.

The Prisoner by Marcel Proust

Not every volume of In Search of Lost Time is cake but The Prisoner is cake. You didn’t find out because you didn’t make it this far.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

As far as I know I have actually read 2666 and yet, somehow, it is cake.

The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom

People love to talk about The Anxiety of Influence, much as they love to talk about cake. However, they have not read it, because if they had they’d know it was cake.

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Only Brontë completists would know that Villette is cake. But they don’t know, because there are no true Brontë completists, because they haven’t read Villette, on account of how it’s cake.

The Riverside Shakespeare

The Riverside Shakespeare contains a thin layer of cake between Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It’s okay, guys. It’s okay. You can give up the pretense now. You’re free. Now put it down, you’re melting the frosting.

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