It’s Thirsty Thursday, and Bookstr is bringing you Booze & Books, our newest weekly feature dedicated to drinking games and booze-book pairings. This week, we’re bringing you another booze & book pairing. Our recommendation? Any booze and any book. Since that’s a little too general, we’re going to be paring classic & popular novels with cocktails to help you get what all the buzz is about. Admittedly, some of these cocktails are pretty vile. But since vile people often feature heavily in books, the drinks make for appropriate pairings. (That is, these cocktails are nasty unless you actually WANT to put milk into beer. If you do, you may be one of the aforementioned vile people.)
So, friends, read up & drink up. By the end of this list, these pages won’t be the only thing turnt.
Remember: drink responsibly and read voraciously!
1. The Great Gatsby – Long Island iced Tea
Images Via Amazon & liquor.com
Ingredients: Gin, white rum, silver tequila, vodka, triple sec, simple syrup, lemon juice, cola. Alternatively, whatever you found in your mom’s cabinets dumped into the sublte water bottle that clearly no longer contains water.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I pair The Great Gatsby with a classy beverage, like a Tom Collins or anything with an umbrella in it? It’s pretty simple—Gatsby’s not all that classy of a guy. He may have some serious panache, but in the end, he’s new-money who likes to show off what he’s got: the biggest house, the best parties, the hottest ride. It all seems romantic because it’s set in the roaring 20s, but if this were the 2000s Gatsby was after a girl who went to the Ivies while he got a practical degree at State, you know he’d be trying to impress her with his McMansion and excessive Instagram stories of his house parties. ESPECIALLY given that the novel is set on Long Island, a place that may as well have been named after the drink.
Also, a Long Island Iced Tea will get you drunk, which is maybe the only thing you’ll have in common with this cast of high-society characters.
2. Landline – 1-900-FUK-MEUP
Images Via Amazon & Drinking.land
Ingredients: Absolut Kurant, Grand Marnier, Chambord raspberry liqueur, Midori melon liqueur, Malibu rum, Amaretto, cranberry juice, pineapple juice, whatever tears you have left to cry.
‘1-900-FUK-MEUP’ is an accurate description, both of the story and what the story does to our fragile little hearts. If you’re not familiar with this newer release from #1 bestselling author Rainbow Rowell, the gist is that Georgie, a TV writer in a failing marriage, discovers a way to communicate with her husband—a phone that makes calls to the past. It seems like a second chance, an opportunity to talk to a younger Neal and fix the problems in their marriage before they begin. But maybe fixing the relationship isn’t the thing Georgie is supposed to do. Maybe she’s supposed to prevent it from happening. Emotional, right? Drink up.
3. The Metamorphosis – A Short Trip to Hell
Image Via Amazon & Relish.com
Ingredients: Peach, strawberry, and wildberry Schnapps, Red Bull, Jägermeister, profound existential pain.
At only fifty-five pages, Franz Kafka’s novelette is a short trip down into the blackest depths of human consciousness. If you can for a moment forget that you’re alone in the world and strapped to a mortal body that may never reflect your internal self-perception, Kafka is here to make sure you remember. We’re all just bugs on this Earth, baby!
4. Equus – Horse Jizz
Image Via Amazon & PROOF.MEDIA
Ingredients: Beer, milk, a sudden loss of dignity.
Whether or not you’ve read Equus, just look at that cover and tell me the pairing doesn’t work.
Also, don’t Google search ‘horse jizz.’
5. The Old Man and the Sea – The Old Man and tHE sEA
Image Via Amazon & Chilled magazine
Ingredients: Rum, Luxardo Maraschino, lime juice, grapefruit juice, years of substance abuse.
Of course Hemingway, literary icon and known drunk, would have a cocktail named after his own work—an accomplishment that, while less impressive than naming a university wing after yourself, may or may not be cooler. Back in 1935, a mystery man in a Cuban bar downed a daiquiri that was left sitting unattended (classy move, E.H.). His response was as to-the-point as his dialogue: “that’s good, but I prefer it without sugar and double rum.”
Apparently, the reason Hemingway wanted less sugar was so he could drink more of them—which makes him as relatable as he was talented.
6. GOOD OMENS – The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Images Via aMAZON & tiPSY bARTENDER
Ingredients: Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Jameson, Johnnie Walker Black, Bacardi 151, at least one bad idea.
Listen: a flaming shot is a beverage that was not created for the flavor. If you start your night off drinking one of these, you’re going to be getting into some shenanigans. And shenanigans is basically the plot of Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens—shenanigans and the End of Days, which are, apparently, exactly the same thing. So why not drink this one at the end of the world? When you wake up the morning after, it’s going to feel like the apocalypse anyway.
7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Fearless Redneck
Images Via Amazon & Inside Tailgating
Ingredients: Jim Beam Black Label Bourbon, Sobe No Fear energy drink, a blatant disregard for your own mortality.
You’ve got to be pretty fearless to start smoking at the age of eleven.
All In-text Images Made With PhotoCollage.
Featured Image Via Giphy.
