World Book Day
We are a team of friendly and dedicated storytellers, and our vision is to make the world fall in love with Scotch whisky. With World Book Day just around the corner on 5th March, it feels like the perfect moment to celebrate our very own Book Club as well as share some of the whisky books our team are most passionate about.
We chatted to Elsa, our Visitor Experience Manager who set up SWE’s Book Club six years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What was the inspiration behind creating SWE’s Book Club?
“It started as a way to keep in touch with colleagues during lockdown. It gave us a nice excuse to speak to people and gave us something to talk about that wasn’t the big and scary pandemic. We meet once a month over Zoom. This initially was just due to the pandemic but once we were back working, we found it gave us some flexibility and made it easier for people to join around their working hours.”
What genre of books do you read?
“We are a group of fiction lovers, so the books are all fiction. I always try to have a range of genres, although on occasion we do have a themed month e.g. it’s always spooky books for October. We’ve read everything from literary classics, such as Jane Eyre and The Murder on the Orient Express, to viral favourites, such as Throne of Glass and The Silent Patient.”
How do you decide which books to include in the selection?
“Every month I put a selection of five books together and then the Book Club get to vote for which book or books they would like to read the most. The catch is, I only give the Book Club the blurbs of the five books. We started doing this early on as one of the things we all liked about Book Clubs is that you read things you might not otherwise read. We decided that by only providing the blurbs, it could take away any preconceived ideas and so we were just voting for what we thought we would enjoy.”
What are you currently reading?
“Our current read is Quicksilver by Callie Hart.”
What is a highlight of being a part of SWE’s Book Club?
“One of the things that I really like about our little Book Club is that some of the team that have moved on to new adventures still join us regularly for the Book Club. It is such a nice way to keep in touch with some of the SWE alumni.”
With storytelling at the heart of what we do, we asked our team to share the Scotch whisky books that have inspired their learning journey the most:
- Jim: The Pocket Guide to Whisky by Blair Bowman
- Ali: The Curious Bartender: An Odyssey of Malt, Bourbon, and Rye Whiskies
- Lenka: Malt Whisky Yearbook and any of Charles MacLean’s whisky history books
- Alex, Ewan, Michael: Whiskypedia by Charles MacLean
- Autumn: Spirit of Place and 30-Second Whisky both by Charles MacLean
- Henry: The Whiskey Masterclass: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Scotch, Bourbon, Rye and More by Lew Bryson