Social media baker extraordinaire B. Dylan Hollis’ favorite recent reads
I’m one of the millions of followers who love B. Dylan Hollis’ humor, style, and baking panache—and his cookbook, Baking Yesteryear, is one of our Amazon Editors’ Picks for the Best Cookbooks of 2023. His cookbook is also a collection of bests—the best bakes of each decade from the 1900s to the 1980s. Want to test drive one of the many wonderful recipes? Here’s one that Hollis himself chose for our Amazon Book Review readers.
We asked Hollis to share some book recommendations, and I love both his choices and witty descriptions of why he chose them.
It's no secret that I love baking. I'm a perennial fan of simple, approachable, and unpretentious bakes. This doesn't mean that I do not enjoy fancy pastries and tarted-up tarts, in fact, I'm rapt by them. It's just that their methods of creation have always seemed shrouded in mystery and guarded majesty. Bake it Better does two things for me: unravels the secrets of fine pastry making at home, and validates my insatiable love for all things chocolate. Matt also happens to be easy on the eyes, but I promise this does not cloud my judgment. —B. Dylan Hollis
It's been a century since The Prophet was published, never once falling out of print since 1923. This is for good reason. I felt it necessary to recommend this book in its centenary, because, in my opinion, it's one of those pieces of literature that is applicable to everyone under the sun: a poetical thesaurus on the human condition. Here, Gibran's collection of prose beautifully lays forth all of your quizzical states of thought, explains the perplexing feelings you thought could never be parsed, and defines the undefinable observations within the theater of your mind. If this sounds dramatically grand and specious, it's because you've not read it. And, lucky for you, it's a very quick, astonishingly meaningful read. —B. Dylan Hollis
As a non-American baker who is entranced by both pies and the cultures of the United States, this book was like a gift from the divine. In reality, it was a gift to the cookbook world from Stacey Mei Yan Fong, who offers not only a scrumptious collection of pies with beautiful photography and fine instruction, but does so in reverence to each of the US states. Importantly, Stacey has plentiful recipes for savoury pies in this book, a subsection of baking that I feel has not been celebrated as much as it should. I adore cookbooks that carve out distinct angles and tell unique stories, and this is a grand example of just that. —B. Dylan Hollis
A phenomenally funny book, and my personal gold standard for humorous social commentary. In this diary, Sedaris tells stories of life's goings-on with such an engaging, oft-overlooked, view of the world. The grace and timing with which he is able to communicate such is equally engaging and worth the read alone. Those wholly unfamiliar with Sedaris or reading diaries might initially find it bemusing, but if you appreciate exceptionally witty writing and jocular anecdotes, I definitely recommend it. —B. Dylan Hollis
For more book recommendations, check out:
- Celebrity picks from the likes of Joshua Weissman, Lucy Score, and Hetty Lui McKinnon
- Best Cookbooks of 2023, as chosen by Amazon editors
- Best Books of 2023, as chosen by Amazon editors
