Much can be said about the virtues of reading a book while sipping a cup of tea. But even more can be said about how often tea is mentioned in books! Tea is part of our culture, as proven in our historic and current literature. EVERY SINGLE book I’ve read in the last year has mentioned tea, and I am not talking about books about tea.

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
• The Round House by Louise Erdich
• In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas
• A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
• The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

Each mentions tea at least once, and some reference tea often. In The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk, by Jennifer Niven, the sailors on the Karluk practically survived on tea alone. The captain even wrote poems about tea.

Even The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, devotes a paragraph to tea:

“The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea.”

What books have you read that mention tea at least once?

by Heather Kreilick