NYTimes.com Book Review - Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis by Kingsley Amis

Dwight Garner's "Toasting the Joys of Imbibing Properly" published in the New York Times on June 4, 2008 reviews Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis by Kingsley Amis.

Everyday Drinking is a compilation of Amis's out-of-print classics on drinking alcoholic beverages, its history, social mores, and etiquette: "On Drink" (1973), "Everyday Drinking" (1983) and "How's Your Glass?" (1984).

Garner's review has pretty much sold me on this book.

I'm not much of a drinker and I haven't read any of those three books and still I may purchase a copy of Everyday Drinking for my ever expanding personal library.

Though I've had Stuart Walton's Out of It: a Cultural History of Intoxication on my "Books to Read" list, I haven't read any books on nor do I own any on drinking and Garner makes Everyday Drinking sound witty and delightful (more so than Out of It). Garner writes:

These books are so delicious they impart a kind of contact high; they make you feel as if you’ve just had the first sip of the planet’s coldest, driest martini.

Click here to read an excerpt of the Introduction and click here to read an excerpt of Chapter One.