Winter is the season for great books and drink. A nearly unbeatable combination is J.P. Donleavy's picaresque masterpiece The Ginger Man accompanied by a few bottles of Old Peculier. The paired influence of the heady brown ale and protagonist Sebastian Dangerfield's tragicomic misadventures will have you ready to run wild in the streets before sobbing in the New Year somewhere down by the river, but that's what the holidays are all about, isn't it?