Books and beer?

Amazon blogger and author Jeff VanderMeer has decided it's time to pair brew with books. He asked several authors -- including Arianna Huffington, Elizabeth Hand, Karen Joy Fowler and Michael Chabon -- what they thought was the best beer to accompany their works. The results range from the easily available to the totally fictional.

I agree -- it's high time to consider beer-and-book pairings. A few more:

Rogue's Shakespeare Stout with any Shakespeare play (although the ones in which Falstaff appears, Henry IV Parts I and II and the Merry Wives of Windsor, seem extra-appropriate).

Yuengling with "Sixty Stories" by Donald Barthelme (because he was born in Pennsylvania).

Brooklyn East India Pale Ale with "Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe because, as my grad school colleague (and Semioclast blogger) Jamie Bono says, "It makes you look like a connoisseur even if you drank it for the first time during your freshman year when you didn't know any better -- slightly bitter but proud of it."

What's your favorite?

Carolyn Kellogg

Comments

[tr]

"Barthelme"

[Jesse]

Any beer. Lately, I have been going to my local CVS or Rite Aid to buy any 12 pack that is 9.99 or 10.99. Although, I bought a 12 pack of Negra Modelo for 11.99 plus CRV.

I buy a 12 pack every two weeks, about. Drink one a day. As I read, trudge, ponder books I am reading. I am reading Plato's Republic right now, started it the other day. On my way to other books on Utopias.

And after years of starting and stopping, befuddled and lazy, I finished Ulysses last week. Have to reread it again, I know--sometime in the future.

I stay away from domestic beers though.

Have Middlemarch in battered and yellowed paperback on the top shelve in my doorless closet there.