Music to Eat Cake By: Essays on Birds, Words and Everything in Between

Music To Eat Cake By was published on 12th November 2020. You can get it anywhere books are sold. I’d recommend an independent bookshop – even if there isn’t one local to you, most places will take orders by phone and online, and will send to you wherever you are. Here are some:

Big Green Bookshop

Bookseller Crow

Kirkdale Books

I’m an affiliate of the new site bookshop.org – if you buy through my shop there I get 10%, and another 10% goes into a pot which is then distributed among independent bookshops.

Another site that supports independent bookshops is Hive. And of course Waterstone’s is well known and an extremely useful place to buy books. You can buy Music To Eat Cake By from any of them using the buttons below.


‘Eccentric and delightful … I loved the feeling that I never knew quite where each chapter was going to take me.’ – Lissa Evans, author of ‘V is for Victory’.


Today’s reader has choices: books about love, about life, about death — and everything in between.

The variety is overwhelming, bewildering. But what if the reader could play a part in producing something different, something about everything, about nothing, about everything and nothing at the same time?

What if the reader could tell the writer what to write about? Lev Parikian asked his readers those very questions, gathered their responses, and then set out to write that book.

Music to Eat Cake By is the result, a collection of essays exploring everything from the art of the sandwich and space travel to how not to cure hiccups and, of course, his beloved birdsong.

Lev considers each subject with his signature wit and warmth, inviting the reader to wonder: what might we ask him to write about next?