About this page

The Good Book

Here you will find some of the books I have enjoyed or found helpful in my quest, as an avid amateur, to better understand and appreciate my drams. These books and those added over the coming months and years are but a sampling of the many available. While I try to stay up with the latest releases, one advantage of writing reviews by subject is that I am not restricted to these. No, my whisky books are loved resources and some of them are decades old and some out of print, but thanks to Amazon, most of them are still available.

You will notice many popular books are not included, or at least not yet. That doesn’t mean I don’t find them worthy of review, only that my review process takes time and I just can’t get to everything all at once. I don’t just dash off a couple of lines after skimming a book. I read each book entirely, thoroughly, and critically, at least twice before putting hand to keyboard.

Do you have a favourite you’d like to see reviewed? Send me an e-mail and I’ll try to get to it as quickly as I can. However, if I don’t consider it recommendable, or it adds nothing new to the literature then likely I’ll just move on to something else. As I say, it takes me a while to write a review and I’d rather focus my efforts on the books I really think will help others discover and learn about whisky.

Are you an author or publisher who’d like to see his book reviewed here? Well if you are patient, I’ll surely buy a copy and post a review eventually. I hope in time this page will grow into a real comprehensive source of whisky book reviews. If you are in a hurry though, yes, go ahead and send me a copy and I’ll read it next. Same rules apply though, no review unless I think it adds to the literature.

Well, maybe I should give you a clue as to what won’t appear here.
1. Books that deal earnestly with such trivia as how to spell whisky or the difference between single malt and pure malt. Sorry guys, only newbies care about this, and not for long either. All whisky countries have used both spellings at one time or another anyway, and Glenfiddich, the first single malt success and best selling single malt of all time was until quite recently labelled pure malt. If you don’t know this you haven’t been around long enough to write a credible book.
2. Books that appear to be written to cash in on the single malt craze and are highly derivative of other books written by knowledgeable whisky authors. This includes many of the alphabetical, distillery-by-distillery guides. Wishart, the Grahams, and The Whisky Yearbook have taken fresh approaches; most of the others just copy The Master, Michael Jackson.
3. Books that are heavily influenced by whisky marketing, advertising, press releases and other industry-generated promo. That said, there are some excellent distillery-published tomes that will eventually be found here.

Over time I will try to cover a broad range of whisky books, and not just Scotch single malts, but Canadian, American, Irish and Japanese whiskies as well. We begin with reviews of several I have truly enjoyed, that offer something original, and one, so over-hyped by the publisher, I felt someone just had to say “enough!” Two of these were published on an early version of Malt Maniacs; the others are new. I am holding them here until Johannes and I agree on an editorial policy for a book reviews page on Malt Maniacs. When that happens, and I surely hope it happens soon, this blog will disappear and the reviews will be transferred over to maltmaniacs.org.

Davin
maltmaniacsdavin@gmail.com