An interesting collection of essays rooted in the subject of that most excellent of beverages, coffee.
It's not as cohesive as perhaps I would have liked, but it's an interesting and engaging, quick read.

One of the inherent challenges of the Object Lessons series is that the topics are vast and coverage is inconsistent from author to author. I had every expectation of thoughtful essays on the topic of coffee and ritual, our reliance on it to stimulate us as well as the economy, and a great number of other possibilities to link it back to our need to connect with people. This ended up being more about her personal reflections and was generally scattered in its approach; it was a little disorienting in its jumping from idea to idea. This is not necessarily a poor choice, but one that did not resonate with my interests. I did not read past the first couple of sections, and had suggested it to a colleague for her love of coffee in hopes that it would be a better fit for her. She didn't end up finishing it either.

This book is one in a series called “Object Lessons” where the focus is on one object, this book is clearly enough about coffee. I love the idea of this series, and I have a few of the books checked out from the library, yet this is the first one I’ve actually read. I thought it would be more focused on coffee but instead it was more a meandering with the author’s life.

After reading the book I found that is actually within the scope of the series, so it was my misunderstanding. Okay, but still I did want a bit more about coffee than I did get here. I understand it isn’t to be fully comprehensive, there are other books for that. But even within the pages, Lenney tells us early on about a survey she sent out to people about coffee for writing this book but it seems to drop off early on and we didn’t get much out of that. It felt odd to bring it up so thoroughly yet not discuss it in details.

In any case the book is enjoyable, the writing decent. I liked the coffee diaries entries, and overall the light tone of the book.

I’d never read any of the Object Lessons series before and while there are some interesting observations on the history of coffee hidden away, the personal overrides everything. The voice isn’t bad, it’s just possibly over-caffeinated, frequently frenetic and not quite what I was looking to settle down with, for that I agree starting the morning alone with coffee is one of the best things.

I'm a massive coffee nerd and I love the Object Lessons series, so I was looking forward to this. I was hoping it would be along the lines of the 'Burger' book – a balance of factual historical detail and sociological analysis. It was... none of those things. Instead it's a long personal essay about the author drinking coffee and her friends drinking coffee. At one point in the book, the author refers to a uni course with this description: "The story of coffee is one rich in history and mythology. It is also a great lesson in biology and ecology, global climate change, development, trade and societal impacts." I would have loved if this book covered even one of those things, but unfortunately it didn't.

I received a complementary copy of this book from the publisher and Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Coffee by Dinah Lenney explores the author's personal significance of coffee and its role in various stages of her life. Lenney is insightful in exploring and analysing the importance of coffee, and does so in an easy-to-read but gratifying manner.

This book is part of the series, Object Lessons, that explores the significance of everyday objects, symbols and signs.

This covers a variety of aspects around coffee, memories, routines, favourites, emotions all based around the key point that coffee is more than just a drink. Would be a perfect gift for any caffeine-addict.

I loved "Coffee" by Dinah Lenney, a charming little book in the Object Lessons series, published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. Lenney, a writer and former actress,  is a coffee connoisseur.  She is so authoritative on the art of making coffee that she  “was suddenly having trouble letting anyone else make the coffee.” In this gorgeous essay, she describes her own experiences with coffee, that of her friends and family, compares the coffee culture in the U.S. to the more casual cups of coffee in France.  She also interviews experts on the history of coffee and the new artisan coffees. A perfect gift book!

My days start out with one of my favorite activities, sipping coffee and reading.  For me, coffee is a favorite beverage in all its many drink forms from iced to brewed to lattes and more.  So, I was intrigued to find this title which is part of a series on everyday items.


The book opens with a quote from Virginia Woolf that lets readers know that her time with her coffee cup was welcome.  It goes on to share the author's experience with this beverage.


Ms. Lenney clearly enjoys her brew.  She opens the book taking readers on her morning coffee preparation routine.  It is clear that this ritual matters to her. This title goes on in a very chatty and personal style to make clear the important role of this drink.


I enjoyed spending time with Ms. Lenney as her thoughts went here and there on the topic of coffee in general, her coffee, her family and more.  I am not sure that this title is for everyone but i definitely enjoyed it...while I drank my coffee!


Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this title in exchange for an honest review.

I don't drink coffee. I think it tastes like dirt. Many a friend has tried to lure me to the so-called dark side of caffeine addiction. That is perfectly fine as according to Lenney's research: people don't drink coffee for the taste, it is an experience. Sounds like marketing bullshit to me.

On the very rare occasion I have coffee, it is because I need to code like a crazy person for a few hours. I drink it black. "Do you drink it black because that is the colour of your soul? Ha ha ha." This was an actual conversations with a friend. Oh yes, who doesn't think "friends" who regurgitate internet memes are so hilariously funny and witty. Am pretty sure at the time my inner monologue questioned why I was friends with them to begin with and proceeded to silently plot their demise via a Force Chokehold. Hmmm... maybe everyone's got it wrong. Tea drinkers are the dark side.

For a book that reads like the word vomit of a vapid, caffeine-fueled, posh twat, it was really quite dull. This isn't a criticism - Lenney is very open this is the voice and tone she was aiming for. Perhaps it was supposed to be a satirical essay casting a disdainful eye over coffee's cultish fanaticism, the art form of drinking coffee, and all those skinny-frap-two-shot-espresso enthusiasts with their FOMO daydreaming they were coffee snobs. Drinking coffee does not make you special. I'm with Lenney's husband on this one when he declares his coffee-making expertise by stating, "I think I know how to pour water".

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Academic for the reading copy.

A charming combination of research journalism, casual interviews and personal insights into why coffee has such an iconoclastic role in daily life. As I also feel strongly about these beverage, I found it highly enjoyable. Going to have to work my way through the “Object Lessons” back catalogue as I am now in love with this format.

ARC from publisher via NetGalley but the opinions are my own.

Another delightful addition to the wonderful Object Lesson series.The author brings us into the importance of coffee in her life.Starting with her initial extremely important first cup of coffe in the morning.Coffee occupies a large Place in her life even in her less then perfect relationship with her mother .This was a really entertaining Ode to coffee..#netgalley#coffee

I found this book to be a little disjointed and that made it hard for me to properly enjoy it.
While there were some interesting things discussed, the way it was all compiled together was a little off putting for me personally.

Essayistic collection of ruminations on coffee, that are so scattered in nature, it feels like someone blasting a shotgun to hit an ant.

Coffee! I drink it! A lot! And I do love it! So I went into this with a cuppa by my side, and was slightly disappointed.

The author has a hard time zeroing in on what she wants to talk about regarding coffee, or at least that's the impression I got. She goes a bit after the technical and biological side, how is it grown, how do experts feel it should be brewed and drank. Then there's the inevitable pushback against the experts, how do regular people drink their coffee, and while it's awful coffee it is also good coffee (the People's Coffee). And it's a weird tangent for her to go off in, I think, because her real fascination is with the personal - what is the role of coffee in daily life, and specifically her family's life. There are moments where she delves into this - very moving is the description of her father always making coffee for her mother. Even when he became too I'll to drink it himself, there he was, brewing coffee for her. It is where coffee intersects with memory and with the time-stamping quality it has (this-is-morning coffee, this-is-evening coffee, etc.).

The author sends out questionnaires to her friends and family, asking about their memories and preferences. And it doesn't really go anywhere.

She reads about how a writer said drinking espressos from midnight till morning yields great writing, and then she spends a page or so fussing why she couldn't do this and I'm left thinking, why not try it? For a week, do the nightly espresso binge and see what happens! You're writing a book about coffee, there is no better excuse.

The author adopts a light, bubbly tone, that I think is supposed to be wry and witty, but for me comes off a bit panicky.

It all feels very scatterbrained an approach to the subject, as if the book was written while being overcaffeinated.

Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book.
Quotes from the book:
"Nobody gets to judge the other guy’s coffee - coffee is personal. Coffee is particular.”
and
“If we only realized: coffee, a personal trigger that it is, connects us with people we’ll probably never meet. If we thought about that, couldn’t it change our attitudes not just toward coffee but toward other human beings?”

"Coffee" by Dinah Lenney is a book from the series Object Lessons. The book is a balance between the author's personal life stories that include coffee and some facts about the drink itself. As a coffee lover that I am myself, I expected the book to be more about stories of the history of coffee and less personal life. Coffee really is more than a drink, it is a whole culture, it has the power to unite people. And the history of coffee and even the process of making it should have been more written about in the book (so I think).

The first Bloomsbury Object Lessons book I read was High Heel (I'll post on it soon), and I can't help feeling that it may spoiled me. I've since been working my way through other titles in the series and, so far, nothing quite lives up to the poetic blend of history, mythology and social history which High Heel accomplished, and which set my expectations (unreasonably high?) for the rest of the books. Take Coffee, for example. If the aim of this series is to present everyday objects in a new light, informing readers about their place in economic, social or art history, or enlightening us about how they're made, you'd have thought that coffee was an easy thing to do well. I'm not much of a coffee drinker myself, but my boyfriend is, and I was hoping to find lots of interesting pieces of coffee trivia with which to impress him. Instead, I found myself ploughing through a bizarre stream of consciousness about the author's life and how she drinks, buys and feels about her own coffee. The few pieces of context that I did pick up were squirrelled away in footnotes, and it's rather disappointing when the two things you take away from a book about coffee are: a) a recommendation of another book that seems to do what this one should have done; and b) an amusing Jewish joke.

Perhaps I've come to this series expecting the wrong thing? Perhaps it isn't supposed to illuminate the histories, mythologies and contexts of everyday objects? Perhaps it's just an excuse for the author to write a long essay on a loosely-connected series of themes of their choice? I found Snake (to be published in the autumn; post to come) equally unsatisfying, but I'm beginning to suspect that I may have got the wrong end of the stick. I suppose I was expecting these books to be more like the Very Short Introductions series, but for things rather than historical periods or philosophies. 

One review I've read of this book noted that the author seems to be overly caffeinated most of the time. I couldn't have put it better myself. Sentences unspool at length, broken by sudden asides; trains of thought are derailed by unrelated stories. Reading this book feels like going for a coffee (obviously) with someone who's so excitable that you end up feeling faintly out of breath in sympathy with them, and whose interest in coffee doesn't extend much beyond the navel-gazing artisanal coffee culture of California. It feels in retrospect as if I've spent most of the book in Lenney's kitchen, listening to her chat expansively about her mother, her family, the machine she uses to make her coffee, the old grinder she used to have, whether coffee should be drunk with milk or not, whether it's really possible to taste different flavours as the coffee-nerds claim, and so forth. I learned that there are coffee farms in California, by which growers hope to 'subvert colonialism' - though wouldn't it be even more subversive to make sure that growers in Africa and South America are paid a fair wage to boost their local economies? I attended a coffee-tasting with Lenney, and learned that in California you can get coffee beans delivered weekly. I learned that, when you ask someone about the best cup of coffee they've ever had, they talk not about the coffee itself but about the setting. (This is true: my boyfriend says the best coffee he ever had was in Rome as a teenager, when the very act of drinking coffee felt incredibly grown-up and luxurious.)

But have these various things enriched my understanding of coffee as an object? Not at all. It might have done more for me if I lived in the USA, but Lenney's account is full of references and brands which don't chime with non-Americans. She uses footnotes to hint at topics of interest, but fails to expand on them. Take the various waves of coffee drinking, for instance. Are we on the third or fourth wave now? The initial drinking of coffee per se doesn't seem to have been a 'wave' at all: the first wave is associated with the increased ease and affordability of by instant coffee, thanks to technology for freeze-drying grounds and vacuum-sealed cans. The second wave has happened largely in my lifetime, with the explosion of coffee shops like Costa Coffee (first shop opened in 1978), Pret a Manger (founded 1983) and Starbucks (first UK store in 1998). The third wave is the artisanal trend for different blends and flavours of coffee, and different methods of actually making the drink. We seem to be on this wave at the moment, although in the UK the third wave doesn't quite go to Californian extremes (unless you're in Hackney, I suppose). However, since we're here, I'll give a well-deserved shout-out to our favourite local coffee-shop, Chapter Coffee in West Kensington. They offer various blends and processing options, roast their coffee on site, sell bags (whole or ground), and do all this without being annoyingly hipster about it. Good job, chaps.

I waited in vain for the history of coffee: not just its origins, which are swiftly dealt with here in the form of rival Ethiopian and Yemeni myths, but the way it became popular across the world. There was nothing here about how its growing popularity in 17th-century Europe was accompanied by continued suspicion of its Muslim origins, to the point that in 1600 Pope Clement VIII had to explicitly approve it as a 'Christian drink'. Nor did we hear about Europe's first coffee house, in Venice in 1645 (perhaps accounting for the Italian affinity for coffee ever since). England wasn't far behind, actually, with a coffee house opening in Oxford in 1652, starting a long tradition of highly-caffeinated scholars. And what about the way that coffee came into Austria on the coat-tails of the Ottoman invasions after 1683, conquering Vienna far more effectively than Turkish forces had ever done? What about the great Viennese grand cafes, with their elaborate social rituals and etiquette, so universally famous that they've been listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage? What about the London coffee-houses, which were hotbeds for news, gossip and political agitation? What about the very name of 'coffee', which derives via a long sequence of linguistic Chinese whispers from the Arabic 'qahwah', meaning 'appetite suppressant'? On that note, what about the numerous health risks or benefits that have been connected with coffee over the years? There's the faintest of nods to that in Lenney's book, but she doesn't go much beyond its role (or not) as a diuretic. 

This feels like a wonderful opportunity that has been missed in favour of a rambling account of Lenney's personal feelings about coffee, which never really gets going. In one of her footnotes (remember, this is where the facts are usually to be found), she mentions a book by Mark Pendergrast called Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World. Unfortunately, it looks like this is the book that I was expecting the Object Lessons book to be. It's a bit of a disappointment, to be honest. Maybe I should revise my expectations for the other books in the series...

And that Jewish joke? Here you go:

"A guy asks a priest, when does life begin? And the priest says: At conception, my son. Then the guy asks a minister, Father, when does life begin? And the minister says: At the moment of birth. To round things out, to be fair, for good measure, the guy approaches a rabbi: Rabbi, when does life begin? he asks. And the rabbi answers: Life begins, my son, when the children leave home and the dog is dead."

This review will be published on my blog on 26 April 2020 at the following link:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/04/26/coffee-2020-dinah-lenney

This was a pleasant enough little book but not as engaging as I hoped it might be. I would have preferred far fewer anecdotes about the author's not-very-interesting personal life and many more anecdotes about the fascinating history of coffee.

Oh dear. In returning to this series of books – sometimes wonderful, sometimes dreadful – this series of frustratingly edited books, after too long away, I find one of the frustrating ones. But this is worse; it's infuriating. I'd got a quarter of the way through the book without, it seemed, learning anything, except the author was fond of pretentiously long sentences, and that she had a mother. Or something. I suppose I ought to have expected pretentiousness in a book about a subject that clearly raises so much pretention – the flavours of coffee, the presentation, the ways of making it, the ways of plucking it from civet shit and dusting it off for the even more pretentious purchaser… The best books under this umbrella would have guided me as a happy scoffer through all that and I'll still be thinking about it over my morning cup of instant tomorrow. I did see the book turn to actually presenting some information, but I really had fallen out with the author long before then – because this is one of the worst books under this umbrella. It's full of needless detours, personal asides, longueurs, yacking seemingly for the point of yacking, and flipping parents. So my search for a quick, erudite lesson into all things coffee hit a right singular brick.

Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup.

Gertrude Stein


Coffee by Dinah Lenney is the latest in the Bloomsbury Academic series of Object Lessons.  Lenney is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and the author or editor of five books, including The Object Parade.


This edition of the series is almost entirely a personal account of the author's relationship with coffee and coffee relationships.  The beginning seemed to flow a bit like stream of consciousness but gained a more normal voice as it continued. As a whole, the book is composed of a collection of ideas and thoughts.  Most people can relate quite a few events in their lives to coffee and the quality of the coffee.  I remember the percolator, the cup I'd grab on the way to high school from a coffee shop, the terrible coffee I had in the Marines, and even a few times of pouring the small packet of instant coffee from C-rations in my mouth and washing it down with canteen water.  Coffee was a cheap and warming drink. That was in the days of Maxwell House and Folgers being considered "good" coffee, and no one drank espresso or knew what a French Press was. 


Lenney contributes her experiences with the drink and presents some thoughts and ideas like why Americans have so many coffee types, and in France, it is basically cafe creme.  I did learn about the name of the weirdest coffee I heard of growing up Chock Full o' Nuts.  It turns out the name had nothing to do with the coffee, but a sandwich.  If one sits down and thinks about it, many events in life can be traced back to coffee.  Today with specialty coffees, coffee equipment, and the popularity of coffee shops like Starbucks where one can hang out or be creative all afternoon or evening, coffee may gain an even stronger relationship to events in our lives.

Delightful. One gets the feeling reading this book that the author was highly caffeinated during the writing of it, flitting here and there from one subject to the next, from personal memories of a life in coffee to observations about coffee culture. The writing is a bit skittish, as if the author can't find her keys, but charming in its skittishness. Haven't we all felt a bit skittish after our fifth cup of coffee? I was hooked when Lenney professed: "A bad cup of coffee isn't bad. On the other hand, a weak cup of coffee?" There's just no reason in the world..." I couldn't agree more. I'm a huge fan of the Bloombsbury Academic OBJECT series (especially High Heel by Summer Brennan). Having once written an entire novel about coffee, I was keen to dig into this one.