Alcademics

All this week I'll be posting book reviews here on Alcademics, and at the end of the week I'll do a giveaway on the Alcademics A-Plus email list for one of five copies of either Kara Newman's Spice & Ice, Mr. Boston's Holiday Cocktails, or Whiskey and Philosophy.

I pretty much read every cocktail, spirit, and drink book I can get my hands on.  My just-drinks bookshelf is long overfull and I find myself trying to cram more stuff onto it all the time. I've now taken to decorating with cocktail books, putting them beneath plant pots, stacking them under furniture, and lining the corners of the apartment with more stacks of them. Chances are in the next San Francisco earthquake they'll find me trapped beneath the books-about-ice section of my imbibrary. 

Lately it seems the cocktail books hitting the market are more and more specific: holiday cocktails, spicy cocktails, champagne cocktails (I think there are three books on that released in the last year), plus books on specific spirits- two on gin in the past few months, and one or more each on every other spirit category. Then we've got all the reprints of pre-Prohibition books thanks to people like Cocktail Kingdom. I am finding some of the newer books on the spirits industry pretty fascinating, as well as some of the more esoteric drinking subject books I'll be reviewing later this week.

Still, more books come out every week and the to-read space on the bookshelf indicates a backlog of about 20 or so more texts I need to review. A book reader's work is never done, and that's a-okay with me.