Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our books today are six sterling choices from that strangest of all biographical sub-genres, the literary biography. A writer friend of mine (too soon gone, but his books live on, which is kind of the whole point, isn’t it?) summed up the strangeness rather well one day while we were prowling the Brattle bargain-carts when […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Queen’s Head, a 1988 murder mystery set in the England of Elizabeth I, written by a first-class hack under the pen-name of “Edward Marston” (there’s an in-joke there, but you’d have to be mighty well-read to spot it, and there’s no class of scribblers better-read, of course, than hacks). The […]
Read MoreEven a winter-fancying polar bear (or perhaps arctic fox? I’ve had my nose licked by the latter and only been silently, systematically terrorized by the former, so maybe we’ll go with “arctic fox”) such as myself could hardly have complained about the gorgeous summer day that unfurled today in observance of the Boston Public Library’s […]
Read MoreMy favorites at over at BookTube continue to do their book-challenges and their book-unboxings and their book-hauls, so I thought I’d post my own first book-haul of June 2014! Not my first book-haul of the month just across the board, mind you; in my unofficial capacity as postal-gopher for Open Letters Monthly, I’m in the […]
Read MoreAs usual, the “Summer Fiction” issue of the New Yorker had its fair share of good things. In years past with these issues, I’ve often had to look elsewhere than the actual fiction to find those good things, but in 2014 the magazine has been on the run of its life for short stories, and […]
Read MoreOur book today is Homer’s Iliad, a choice some of you will have been expecting all throughout this “summer books” thread, since I’ve made no secret of the fact that I re-read Homer every year, the Iliad in June and the Odyssey in August. I use them as mental bookends to what we’ll increasingly need […]
Read MoreOur books today form an essential part of “summer” reading: trash. I mentioned yesterday the peculiar mongrel enjoyability of a crappy book, but I mentioned it in context of the sci-fi/fantasy genre, which is thickly populated with very brainy authors, most of whom, when sober, would sternly disavow the idea that they ever intentionally wrote […]
Read MoreOur books today are yet another steady go-to choice for “summer books”: science fiction and fantasy novels, most of which I tend to read during the lazier summer months. Is there any point in concealing the fact that this is because the books themselves are often lazier? Most of them – even the best of […]
Read MoreOur books today might seem like strange candidates for the category of “summer books,” since we naturally equate all things Sherlock Holmes with fog-bound London rather than sun-brightened Boston, but as I mentioned yesterday, an equally-important element of summer books is their feeling of ease, of being a home rather than a journey. I think […]
Read MoreOur books today speak and breathe of summer, because June traditionally ushers in the long march of summer in Boston. The days are longer, and usually, at least in June, the evenings slowly glide into fragrant, cool relief from the day’s heat, and something ineluctable changes just a bit in the mental atmosphere. Though I’ve […]
Read MoreThe hands-down winner for Most Obnoxious Opening Paragraph for a Book Review This Week goes to New Criterion editor and publisher Roger Kimball, reviewing Christopher Buckley’s new essay collection But Enough About You in the National Review: I’d known for years that Christopher Buckley was an amusing man. His novel Thank You for Smoking (1994), […]
Read MoreA rip-snorting new Penguin Classic gives us the memoir of a teenager who flew fighter planes during World War I
Read MoreOur book today is Medicus, the 2006 debut Roman murder mystery by Ruth Downie starring wry, brooding medical man Gaius Petreius Ruso, who’s chosen, with uncharacteristic impulsiveness, to respond to the death of his father and a painful divorce back in Rome by moving to the farthest reach of the Empire, distant Britannia, and […]
Read MoreOur books today are two oldies but goodies, A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age (1909) and A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age from Tiberius to Hadrian (1927) by J. Wright Duff, who labored over them for a huge chunk of his life and […]
Read MoreNaturally, Scott Sherman’s well-done article in The Nation on the parlous state of the university press grabbed my attention. Sherman writes about the roughly 100 university presses in the United States but concentrates especially on the vast majority of them that don’t rest on “the feathery cushion of an endowment” but rather face the hurly-burly […]
Read MoreOur book today is a delightful curiosity called Genji Days by Edward Seidenseticker, whose 1976 translation of Murakami Shikibu’s great epic novel The Tale of Genji was as thoroughly the definitive Genji of his generation as Arthur Waley’s had been for the previous generation – or, indeed, Royall Tyler’s 2001 version is currently. For thousands […]
Read MoreOur book today is Stan Cutler’s 1994 mystery novel Shot on Location, a snapping-good Hollywood whodunit starring the unlikely duo of fifty-something “fixer” tough guy Rayford Goodman and twenty-something gay writer Mark Bradley – a duo who might never have met each other except that Mark Bradley’s seedy publisher, Pendragon Press, has secured the […]
Read MoreOur book today is This Thing of Darkness, a whopping-long 2005 historical novel by Harry Thompson about the fateful voyage of the HMS Beagle to Tierra del Fuego in 1828. The ship was captained by 23-year-old Robert FitzRoy, and of course its most famous passenger was the young amateur naturalist Charles Darwin. But Thompson’s novel […]
Read MoreThe 1990s came rushing back into the spotlight for me today in the Penny Press, first in the latest Vanity Fair, which had not only an entertainingly angry piece by Lili Anolik on the whole culture-altering media circus of the O. J. Simpson trial, and then a piece written by Monica Lewinsky, whose scandal with […]
Read MoreThe rest of the world may be unpredictable (earthquakes, tidal waves, polar ice-caps summarily melting, a snowstorm and a tornado on the same day in Colorado, 40-degree temperature drops in Boston in a 10-hour period, etc.), but one thing can always be counted on in a bookworm’s life: the need for acquiring more books. I […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.