Iain Banks, Raw Spirit
My memory of reading Iain Banks, which so far unaccountably is only The Hydrgen Sonata , has long told me that I really like him as a writer. When I revisited this morning my own review from many years ago , however, I was surprised to see that I was misremembering, so maybe I'll have to read more of his Culture novels. In the meantime, I've now also read his nonfiction Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram , and came away both enthralled (especially at first) and let down (though only toward book's end, really), which I think wouldn't trouble him even a whit. At the height of Banks' success, his agent calls up to ask if he'd be interested in a proposal she'd received, that would see Banks driving around Scotland trying to visit every single distillery to compare their various Scotches. Banks' interest knew no bounds: "I was so excited I think I took my feet off the desk" (p18), and with that, he was off. There's lots to appreciate abo
