#6 History of the World in Six Glasses

For a while now, probably if I'm gonna tie it down to a date, about since my birthday, I've been all about accepting and encouraging my inner nerd. A part of me kind of wants to make a vow to read nothing but nonfiction for, I guess not the rest of the year, but hey, maybe the next six months? And reading books like this makes me feel that promise might not be so hard to keep.

Standage takes beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and coca-cola, and shows how we've hauled them with us through the growth of our civilization, from the very first groups in Mesopotamia that decided that agriculture was way cool (maybe in part because it meant they'd have BEER) to an individual product becoming one of the most recognized words worldwide.

I could go on and on. There's so much packed into this book, connections you'd ordinarily never make between, say, that tea you had this morning and its legacy as being connected to empire, the rise of the world-dominating corporation, the opium trade and even wars. That's really what makes history so interesting isn't it? Seeing how things were knit together to create the world you live in today for reasons you'd never expect based on the rudimentary education most of us got in the subject as schoolchildren.

It's very well-written and entirely fascinating. And on goes my vow to only read non-fiction for the next...ah, let's say three months for now.