Book review: How To Leave Twitter by Grace Dent

My edition: Paperback, published in 2011 by Faber and Faber, 208 pages.

Description: Three years ago columnist and author Grace Dent joined new social network site Twitter, mainly as a place to dump her surplus jokes, rant about garbage TV and post exclusive j-pegs of her hot new toenail-varnish.

But as every 're-tweet' and 'Follow Friday' saw her audience figures soar by tens of thousands, Dent found herself centre-stage in an all-consuming highly addictive social network revolution. One where the gags, gossip, scandal and backstabbing literally never stop. Here Dent takes a hilarious, acerbic look at what's really going on in Twitterworld; who's actually tweeting, who's really reading your tweets and what's behind the 140 character lies they tell.

She looks at the highs and grotty lows of twitter addiction, the shameless social climbers, the friends you'll make and the ones you can't get bloody rid of, the barefaced bragging, the shameful celeb-stalking, and the truth about 'twanking', twitter cliques, angry 'twitchfork mobs' and dealing with trolls.

Rating:

Review: Starting Over One Cake at a Time by Gesine Bullock-Prada

My edition: Hardcover, published in 2011 by Allison & Busby, 270 pages

Description: As head of her celebrity sister's production company, Gesine Bullock-Prado had a closet full of designer clothes and the ear of all the influential studio heads, but she was miserable. The only solace she found was in her secret hobby: baking. With every sugary, buttery confection to emerge from her oven, Gesine took one step away from her glittery, empty existence—and one step closer to her true destiny. Before long, she and her husband left the trappings of their Hollywood lifestyle behind, ending up in Vermont, where they started the gem known as Gesine Confectionary. And they never looked back.

Starting Over One Cake at a Time follows Gesine's journey from sugar-obsessed child to miserable, awkward Hollywood insider to reluctant master baker. Chock-full of eccentric characters, beautifully detailed descriptions of her baking process, ceaselessly funny renditions of Hollywood nonsense, and recipes, the ingredients of her story will appeal to anyone who has ever considered leaving the life they know and completely starting over.

Review:

Author Gesine Bullock-Prado writes in a humorous way about her former Hollywood life and how she eventually finds her true calling in the one occupation she always took solace in when life became too stressful: baking.

To get the big question out of the way first, yes the author is the younger sister of actress Sandra Bullock. But those who start reading the book expecting to find Bullock's dirty little secrets on display will be thoroughly disappointed. Instead "Sandy" is mentioned in regularity as the helpful older sister and at times the reader forgets Bullock-Prado is actually talking about the Hollywood star.

Personally I expected Starting Over One Cake at a Time to be a combination of a chick-lit and Hollywood superficiality but on contrary, it's an honest and often hilarious memoir about Bullock-Prado's childhood in Germany and later on the United States where she does not shy away from recounting her mistakes both as a child and adult. Having German ancestors myself I felt a familiarity in her wonderful descriptions of the towns, customs and delicious baked good that made the book even more real and fascinating to me. And on top of that every chapter ends with a mouth-watering recipe fitting to the story - pure pastry heaven for an amateur baker such as myself.

10/10

Review: The Garden in the Clouds by Antony Woodward

My edition: Paperback, published in 2011 by HarperPress, 294 pages

Description: What do you do when you fall so in love with a place you can't think about anything else? And what if it happens to be five rocky acres so high up a Welsh mountain it's routinely lost in cloud?

To Antony Woodward it was obvious. You move there with your family and make it a garden - one which, naturally, must get into the hallowed Yellow Book of outstanding gardens.

Moving, through-provoking and brilliantly funny, this memoir of landscape, childhood and wily mountain sheep grapples with that fundamental question: what is gardening really about?

Review:

The Garden in the Clouds is not an encyclopaedia with gardening tips and facts but rather an autobiographical tale of an, as the subtitle indicates, hopeless romantic. It's the story of Antony Woodward and his ideal to make a garden in the clouds. Or high up on the mountains as the case may be. From the move to Wales to all the various parts that make up his unique garden the author uses each chapter to dive into a different aspect of the transformation and manages to not only make the story consistently engaging but also surprisingly humorous. Some of the choices he has made along the line were hardly thought through properly and he knows it. Yet Woodward did not choose to rewrite those parts or ignore them, instead he uses a healthy dose of self-deprecation which makes him much more likeable and relatable and prompts the reader to root for him despite the very unlikely goal of converting the unappealing waste land into something worthy to be included in the Yellow Book of the National Garden Scheme.

There were a few points to the story that the realist in me despite getting lost in the hopelessly romantic musings and actions of the author questioned however. Such as the details of the relocation from London to Wales and how the author managed to get by without a steady job and income. I am assuming at least that both he himself and his wife left their jobs in London and did not instantly start working again in Wales. The story indicates that since the move they spent most if not all of their time on the garden and especially when reading about some of Woodward's more expensive impulse buys it left me wondering how he was still able to support his family (and on that note, his wife must be an absolute saint for putting up with his splurges and his more often than not rather unrealistic ideas such as the sudden urge to obtain a railway carriage to decorate part of their land).

Having said that, the descriptions of the area the story is set in are wonderfully lush and transports the reader to the rugged Welsh country side. And despite all the hiccups author Anthony Woodward encounters during his various antics (from bees invading the house to inventive sheep getting into his vegetable patch) after finishing the book I wanted to do nothing more than to pick apples in an orchard, mow a field with an antique tractor and make my own award winning honey - sticky mess and all.

8/10