My reading taste is catholic, small "c" and I, like most of you early adopters, read rather a lot, I imagine--- the literary equivalent of unhinge-your-jaw-and-glut-your-maw. I tend to post these on the Unkindness in a somewhat futile effort to encourage conversation, but I did recently finish The Empire of Tea, which among other things traces the urbanization of civilization in the post-guild age to the popularization of the beverage. Before tea made boiling water in the production of potables, the safest things to drink were alcoholic, you see, which did not necessarily contribute to sober and businesslike behavior.
