Tag: David Mitchell

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A Book & A Beer – Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue is the latest from David Mitchell. I have liked his genre busting switches from coming of age to time travel to ancient Japan and how he has woven in characters across books.

The latest is an Almost Famous tale of a band from their formation through success and the tragedies minor and major along the way. There is also a side story about a ghost that haunts one of the players.

Overall, I found it to be a good set of people to ride along with but that the journey itself was kind of caught between doing a standard rock novel but just with flourishes added to it. On the plus side, when the songs were described, they sounded real and of the time. Not some fake tune that you would never believe was a top ten hit. Your mileage may vary on the celebrity cameos as well. I found them a bit annoying.

Since the band starts in England and then conquers the world. I would suggest having a beer corresponding to where they are in the world. Start with a proper pint of bitter, move on to some European pilsner, have some New York craft beer and then finish with beers from L.A. and San Francisco.

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A Book & A Beer – Slade House

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This month we delve into the interlocked world of David Mitchell and his haunted house mystery, Slade House.

First, a little digression. Most people know the author David Mitchell from the Cloud Atlas book that became a movie with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. Now that book was fine but I really liked Black Swan Green more and I grew to like The Bone Clocks and the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet more as well.

It helps to know when reading from the Mitchell oeuvre that characters from one book might wash ashore in another and that souls don’t seem to be anchored down very tightly either.

Back to Slade House, until the end it is a horror/fantasy straight out of the X-Files. A sibling duo that needs to feed every nine years to power their lifestyle. Then they choose the wrong person at the end, a leading Bone Clocks character ends the story and ties it into the other books.

For beers, gotta go dark and British and well evil is connected to the color black so first up is Black House from Modern Times followed by Black Cab from Fuller’s a thoroughly English Porter.

Or in a nod to name dropping that Mitchell does so well, maybe a dark mild from Timothy Taylor since Jason Taylor from Black Swan Green shares a name with the brewer.