After a Day of Stupid: Booze has occupied a top shelf in literature since the time of the Greeks.
Along with all the philosophizing that goes on in Plato’s Symposium, there’s a shitload of drinking, since getting blasted on wine and debating the meaning of life was the whole point of a “symposium.” Exhibit B? The Bacchae, by Euripides, considered one of the greatest plays ever written. Not messing around, it makes Dionysus, the god of wine, its protagonist.
Shakespeare got in on the action with Falstaff, the corpulent knight who shows up in three different plays hanging out at the Boar’s Head Tavern getting wasted on sherry. Drinking buddy of Prince Hal, future king, Falstaff got his own Orson Welles movie, Chimes at Midnight, and inspired Falstaff Beer out of St. Louis, merrily quaffed for 102 years.
Books and beer, lit and liquor — they go together. Reading while buzzed is a risk-free activity (unlike, say, swinging a kettlebell through your legs drunk at the gym). Not for nothing do you have bookstores offering adult beverages these days. Next time you’re in Hudson, New York, check out Spotty Dog Books & Ale. Or grab a cocktail at Denver’s BookBar. And it’s not like you have to reach back to ancient Athens or Renaissance England for a work of hooch lit. Here’s our line-up of ten modern and contemporary keepers. They bottle their topic in different ways, but all give a leading role to the sauce.
Everyday Drinking
Twentieth-century British writer Kingsley Amis, father of novelist Martin, drank like a fish, excelled at zingers, and wrote superbly. His hangover riffs, here and in Lucky Jim, are the gold standard. “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night,” Amis writes in Jim, his first novel. This compendium, fizzily introduced by Christopher Hitchens, gathers the hilarious drink columns Amis wrote in the seventies and eighties. (Wine drinkers, be warned: He takes the piss out of your kind.)
The Joy of Mixology
A legendary barkeep and widely published writer, Gary Regan — mentor to hundreds of bartenders, cocktail competition judge, and longtime drinks columnist — is an ideal booze Yoda. Though written as a professional guide, this book works for anyone hoping to up their mixology game. The way it pulls back the curtain on Regan’s world will enrich your convivial nights out.Plus, the author shares recipes, including for his esteemed margarita.
Drinking with Men
Rosie Schaap, daughter of the late sportswriter Dick Schaap, sister to ESPN’s Jeremy, is a Brooklyn bartender, terrific writer, and lover of a good pub. Here she serves up an engaging, artfully written memoir focused on the intersection of her life with bar culture from the time she could drink. She shares stories, sketches portraits of regulars, and celebrates some of her favorite watering holes from Dublin to L.A. to New York.
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
“My name is Tucker Max and I am an asshole.” So began this 2006 best-seller by a womanizing, bar-hopping dude smart enough to attend the U of Chicago and Duke Law. Max turned tales of guzzling, fucking, mocking posers and twits, and all-around drunken jackassery into a publishing gravy train that’s sold two million copies. Beer him!
The Lost Weekend
Made into an Oscar-winning movie by Billy Wilder of Some Like It Hot fame, this 1944 novel, written by booze-addicted Charles Jackson, scandalized readers with its tale of an epic bender by an alcoholic New York writer. In one famous scene, our hero Don trudges 60 blocks to pawn his typewriter, only to find the shop closed. Think Leaving Las Vegas without the call girl, and with a fall down stairs instead of into a poolside glass table.
Blackout
For years, Texas writer Sarah Hepola got loaded and slept with men she’d just met, barely or not at all remembering how she got in their beds. Blonde, pretty, smart, and witty, she was a party girl — until she realized it was destroying her life. This critically acclaimed 2015 memoir, like Drinking With Men, explores life in bars, but from a very different perspective.
Proof
Named a 2014 best science book by multiple publications, Proof, by Wired editor Adam Rogers, pops a top on the “science of booze.” Get your liquor geek on as the entertaining author hits laboratories, distilleries, wineries, and more, decanting insights from chemistry, metallurgy, neurobiology, psychology, and other relevant fields. In the hangover chapter, we learn Rogers’s technical term for the 23 percent of us who don’t get hung: “Jerks.”
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway’s breakthrough 1926 novel of Paris, Spain, bullfighting, lust, journalism, friendship, and Americans abroad also features a mind-blowing amount of drinking. Characters raise a glass (or squirt wine from a goatskin bag) more than 800 times. They down beer, punch, champagne, absinthe, cognac, liqueurs, and a couple barrels of wine. Everyone’s lit, all the time. Do not attempt a drinking game with Papa’s masterpiece!
The Drunken Botanist
This best-selling 2013 book illuminates alcohol and mixology in the freshest of ways. It explores the herbs, flowers, fruits, trees, and fungi that for thousands of years have been our sources for beer, wine, spirits, and other drinks. Author, gardener, and horticultural blogger Amy Stewart tells of the eureka moments, the trial and error, the craft behind the creation of our beloved gin, sake, and bourbon. Lively and funny, nothing if not enthusiastic, Stewart says a trip to a liquor store just fills her head with origin stories.
Drink
Perhaps you’ve heard of beer towers: colossal plastic cylinders filled with well over a hundred fluid ounces of lager, ale, what have you. This brilliant book — all 560 pages of it — is the hooch-lit equivalent of a beer tower. Iain Gately surveys the whole history of booze, from its start 8,000 years ago, through the Mayans and their pulque, all the way to Budweiser’s Spuds McKenzie. Subtitled “A Cultural History,” the account even covers the world’s most famous drinkers and drinks.
