Hayes Valley's literary watering hole Two Sisters Bar and Books is the perfect place to get a drink with your favorite author. That is, it's the kind of bar at which you can get a cocktail and pull out a novel without drawing stares. "My sister and I like to drink whiskey and we like to read books," says general manager Mikha Diaz, "and we like to do them at the same time. We couldn't find a bar where we could do that without getting asked what we were doing, so we just opened one." Library, meet libations. A natural extension of the bar’s philosophy, then, is the Books and Booze Club: either a reading club with a drinking component or a drinking club with a reading component.

Run by a devoted group of regulars including Mikha, the Books and Booze Club selects a fiction or non-fiction work that meets one (or more) of four criteria. Books must be about San Francisco, by a San Francisco author, about booze, or about bars. Does that make it the ultimate San Francisco reading circle? Meetings are held monthly in the buzz of the bar at 579 Hayes Street, and have ranged in participation over the club's year-and-a-half lifespan from an entire room of readers to a small table of them for intimate discussions. Come in for a meeting with the month’s reading in hand and you’ll receive a special discount on a cocktail paired to the book. Last month’s novel was Liquor, a New Orleans "food soap opera" according to one reader. Sazerac was the appropriate pairing, a rye whiskey and bitters drink originated in the Big Easy. "One of the things I liked is yes, this book understood what it's like to be a line cook in your twenties," Mikha remarked at the meeting, "The way that they drink, that's really what they do." Mikha would know, and with material thematically close to San Francisco bars, such verisimilitude matters. Discussion swirled from chapter to chapter and then from book to book and unrelated topic to unrelated topic, encompassing the best of a bar room literary conversation. This month’s reading is The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It. The drink pairing shouldn’t be hard to guess, and the assignment, along with a thoughtful blurb, is posted as usual at the Two Sisters website. With the meeting next Wednesday the 26th from 6pm to 8pm, there's plenty of time to pick up a copy and join the bubbly discussion.