The Elector:

The book is 300 rubles, a bottle of beer 40. For many, the choice is obvious.

I probably don’t understand something, but why not a noble before... adult after work drink a little beer while reading a good book. With materialism and empiriocriticism, or with Engels’s correspondence with Kautsky, it is unlikely that it will go into the right throat, but with fiction, Mark Twain and even Chekhov, in my opinion, it is quite possible to combine and get double pleasure.
Personally, I don’t drink beer, I don’t like it, but I can drink tea and sometimes even cognac while reading.

You can already tremble from indignation and anger.