The First Stevereads Book Outlet BOX-HAUL!

A little while ago, having been trapped indoors by ten-foot snow drifts for a week or two or three, I decided to spend my $5 coupon and go shopping at Book Outlet again, just the way all my favorite enthusiastic young BookTubers do! I browsed for a few days (it’s oddly time-consuming, clicking back through all the pages of my many categories of interest), slowly adding items to my ‘shopping cart,’ secretly hoping I’d soon have enough items to warrant shipping in a genuine Book Outlet box, just like the boxes I’ve seen so many happy BookTubers open on-camera in the bizarre BookTube ritual known as the “Book Haul Unboxing.” And soon, I had five books picked out – surely enough, I thought, for a box this time instead of the plastic envelope from last time. So I placed my order, waited several years for the package to arrive (granted, there was unprecedented snow on the ground here in Boston, but even so, I’m pretty sure Book Outlet shipped my order via pack mule rather than anything actually motorized), and then had a Book Outlet box in my greedy hands! I unboxed it and out spilled my latest goodies:

Seducing Mr. Darcy by Gwyn Cready – this playful 2008 romp of a pastiche caught my eye for the obvious reason: the half-naked sight of that old Stevereads obsession, Paul Marron, on the front cover, getting his Seinfeld-style puffy shirt yanked off by a brazen hussy in a blue dress and stiletto heels. But in pursuing my readerly duty (and not wanting to feel quite entirely like a marketing tool being moved around on a board), I delved into the actual text of the thing and was quite glad I did! The story involves feisty, opinionated, and not excessively literary heroine Flip Allison, who – after a particularly invigorating and semi-mystical massage (it’s a long story, but obviously Cready was as tired as I was of magic casements, magic writing tables, magic rings, and all other magic means of getting present-day heroines into the, um, arms of Regency England’s most alluring fictional bachelor) – finds herself a character in Pride and Prejudice, accidentally coming between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet … with repercussions that follow Flip back into the ‘real’ world, where she finds the intruded presence of her character has become a source of outrage for Austenophiles everywhere, including, of course, super-sexy Austen-scholar Magnus Knightley. In short a romance novel bought for, er, non-literary reasons could hardly have turned out more enjoyable.

The Shadow Prince by Terence Morgan – I found this 2012 novel at Book Outlet while browsing and was initially taken aback; here it was, a novel about Perkin Warbeck, that most celebrated of all the insurrectionists Henry VII had to face, and somehow I’d missed it? But then I checked online and discovered the US release of the book had what was, perhaps, the single most boring book-cover in the history of printing – call it the anti-Seducing Mr. Darcy. The nicely-done cover of this UK paperback from Book Outlet was enough to get me over that hurdle – and boy am I glad of it: unlike the other forty novels I’ve read about Perkin Warbeck, The Shadow Prince is not only good by very good, a taut and totally believable take on one of the least-believable frauds in history. Somehow, out of that fraud and trampling this very, very well-trampled ground, Morgan managed to create a genuinely gripping Tudor historical novel – one I’d certainly have praised back in 2012 if I’d given it a second glance.

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan by James Mann – I eagerly read this book back when it came out in 2009 with its own tremendously bad cover (an extremely ill-advised portrait of President Reagan as some kind of Hollywood stand-in for Soviet Premier Brezhnev), and although it entertained me, I never gave it a second thought after that, not even to the extent of realizing that the paperback had been one of those orange-spine Penguins of which I have so many on my history bookshelves. Mann of course struck publishing gold with his 2004 book The Rise of the Vulcans, and although The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan isn’t as good as that earlier book, it’s less the fault of the writing – Mann is one hell of a writer – than it is the fault of the premise, which in The Rise of the Vulcans was an opinionated but tenable take on ‘wartime president’ George W. Bush’s cabinet workings but in The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is, as far as I can tell, a neocon fantasy on the magnitude of The Lord of the Rings, all about how the surfer was, it turns out, actually in control of the wave: about how President Reagan’s stubborn patriotism and underestimated intelligence (or was it stubborn intelligence and underestimated patriotism?) won the Cold War when nobody was looking. In what has to be considered the coup to end all coups (if such a word isn’t indelicate in this setting), the book has a back-cover blurb from Mikhail Gorbachev himself, however, and I smiled all through my re-reading.

The Abomination by Jonathan Holt – The galley copy of this one came and went through my hands like water back in 2013, and when I read the wonderful column on it written by my unsinkable Open Letters Monthly colleague Irma Heldman (I believe the title of the piece was “There is within every man and woman a core of evil only lightly held in check” – which certainly sounds like Irma), I bitterly regretted the fact that I no longer owned a copy. The slushy, seductive city of Venice and I have a long and utterly wonderful history, and in the aftermath of that history, like an ex-boyfriend who just can’t let go, I’ve read as many Venice books as I could find, so when I saw a UK paperback of this one for sale at Book Outlet, I immediately added it to my haul. It’s a disarmingly topical novel in which an Italian policewoman and a US army officer team up to solve the vicious and sacrilegious murder of two women during the Venetian festival of Le Befana, and as is so often the case, Irma was entirely right about how downright good it is, truly a Venice novel to savor.

Albert by Jules Stewart – The fact that I missed this last volume when it first appeared is a bit less surprising to me, since its publisher, I. B. Tauris, has never been exactly punctilious about keeping Open Letters supplied with its latest releases (although their recent release Mark Antony and Popular Culture by Rachael Kelly was quite good). But I have a long and well-documented history of reading pretty much anything written about Queen Victoria’s famous and yet still-enigmatic Prince Consort, and Stewart’s book turned out to be really interesting – stern but not brutal, partially admiring but not at all sycophantic, perfectly bearing out the wisdom (well, or what have you) of my book-buying philosophy at Book Outlet: would I spend what they’re asking for a particular book if I found it for that price at my beloved Brattle Bookshop? Would my likely enjoyment of it merit that much money and no more? This Stewart book wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever read on Prince Albert, but it wasn’t the worst either, and it very consciously added a new voice to the Albertine chorus, so it was well worth the pittance I paid.

And there you have it! The contents of my very first really proper Book Outlet book-haul! With each one of these, I feel like I’m inching closer and closer to being some kind of honorary BookTuber, only minus the luminous skin tone and heavily-pomaded hair. My one regret this time around? No discount coupon from the folks at Book Outlet! They’re already taking me for granted, it seems. And justifiably so: I’ve already got another ‘shopping cart’ slowly growing.