My sister dutifully gave me book tokens for my birthday and for my Christmas present. It might seem a bit boring, but when you consider that my brother bought me a book I got myself two months ago, then it’s not a bad thing.
So on the 27th off we trot into Norwich to size up the sales. For some reason, Next felt it needed to open at 5.00am, and I see exhausted men standing staring into infinity with 6 large Next Sale bags, as they wait for their other halves to return with more clothing. I won’t go into a shop as crowded as that.
I do head to WH Smiths, Ottakers and Waterstones, and do you know what, it’s a pile of books that I come home with. All are hardbacks that are happily half price.
The first is the new Iain Banks book Raw Spirit. This was serialised on Radio 4 just before Christmas, but I must admit that I haven’t listened back to it yet. So reading the book is a fresh experience. Radio 4 often do serialise good books, but I never know whether to listen to them or read them first. Much is obviously cut to end up with a cumulative running time of just over an hour, but the end is surely given away?
This is Banks’ first non-fiction book, and if you didn’t look too closely, you surmise that it’s a book about whisky and whisky distilleries. And you’d be close to being right. That is what the book’s “about”, but in reality it’s a few months in the life of Iain Banks. It’s much closer to a Bill Bryson book really, with stories about the places he visits, and lots of personal anecdotes that tend to wander into autobiographical territory. It’s not even that much a travel book, as Banks has been to many of the places he’s visiting before (if not the distilleries themselves), and as likely as not has friends living locally. And since he lives in Scotland, he’s “commuting” to many of these places without stopping over for more than a night or so.
That all said, I loved it. I did learn more about whisky, and I speak as someone who’ll happilyt visit a distillery as often as I pass one. Indeed I went out and bought a close relative of a whisky mentioned in the book at Sainsburys just the other day. (A brief aside here. Struggling home with six bags of shopping and not taking a taxi is a really really really bad idea in retrospect).
Banks is something of a raconteur, and he has strong beliefs. This tour took place to the backdrop of the war in Iraq and he has some strong views which don’t so much seep into the book as stop the book dead in its tracks while he extolls them. I don’t have a problem with this in the slightest. The new Le Carr� which is close to the top of my reading pile has been criticised for similar views. We’ll have to wait and see.