Books / Is coffee-drinking the new secular religion? |
A lot of books, obviously depending on what mood you’re in and viewed from a certain angle, slantwise or squintlike, hover on the edge of self-parody: the Bible; poetry, particularly if American; pretty much everything on a Booker shortlist; Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; Ottolenghi’s cookbooks. Like most things, the best approach to books is to view them with a mixture of open-minded curiosity and outright hostility – is this thing actually profound, useful, interesting or an irritating waste of time and money, a bit of a joke, offensive, crass or just stupid and worth avoiding at all costs?
The Book of Coffee by the philosopher Julian Baggini, with a foreword and afterword by the co-founder of Square Mile Coffee Roasters, James Hoffmann, presents the classic duck/rabbit book self-parody problem. Indeed it often seeks to anticipate the reader’s confusion and scepticism and make this uncertainty into part of the performance. At times it’s hard to tell whether one is being gently enlightened or elegantly teased.
Keir Starmer has one card left to play
Jess Phillips’s resignation will be particularly painful for Starmer
For those who don’t know, Hoffmann is the high priest of contemporary coffee culture, whose YouTube videos about grind size........