Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
2015 has been blessedly full of whoppingly huge new biographies, and I’ve read as many of them as I could (and I’ve got my lustful eye on the remainder, hoping to devour them before the year ends). I unabashedly love whoppingly huge biographies, but they have one drawback: their printed versions take up a hell […]
Read MoreI don’t often give my second-tier periodical reading the attention it deserves here on Stevereads, which is a little unfair considering how much reading enjoyment it so regularly gives me. It’s true that my main fare comes from mighty banquets like the TLS or the New York Review of Books or Harper’s or the Atlantic […]
Read MoreOur book today is the lovely 1947 volume The Birds of Britain, written by zoologist James Fisher as part of the wonderful “Britain in Pictures” series from Collins that was once so popular and that now stands in bad needs of a series-wide reprint. That day will never come, I suspect, but The Birds of […]
Read MoreOur book today brings back sweet, sweet memories. It’s Our Capital on the Potomac, a wonderful 1924 history of Washington, D.C by Helen Nicolay, who was an energetic researcher and something of Beltway aristocrat, being the daughter of President Lincoln’s beloved secretary John Nicolay. She was a wonderful hostess, an inevitable fixture in the town’s […]
Read MoreThis last week turned out to be a sharply sad one for me, in the realm of comics. I was reading a spattering of the latest “Convergence” spin-off issues from DC, all of them set in the various fractured sideline-realities and featuring DC characters from various titles and imprints over the decades before the company’s […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Other Nile, a slim, somewhat fey travelogue written in 1986 by Charlie Pye-Smith about his travels down the Nile through Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia. The book is evocative as all travel-writing should be; the author is forever describing things that are being overtaken by other things – his book […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Last Ship by William Brinkley, a 1988 exponent of the whole sub-genre of military techno-fiction Tom Clancy had created virtually from scratch four years earlier with The Hunt for Red October – but also an exponent of a much older sci-fi tradition: the post-apocalyptic survival-story, along the lines of Alas, […]
Read MoreReading the cover story of the latest Harper’s, David Bromwich’s magisterial, damning assessment of the Obama presidency, certainly did no wonders for my lunch-time digestion. Just the first paragraph reads like a cold halibut across the face: Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Rise of Roscoe Paine, a delightful 1912 novel by the Joseph Lincoln, who died half a century ago but who, for half a century before that, enjoyed a very nice career as a novelist and balladeer, singing the praises of a gently mythologized Cape Cod in book after book, much […]
Read MoreOur book today is a good oldie reprinted for crass opportunistic motives: it’s the latest “Epic Collection” from Marvel Comics, The Avengers: Behold … The Vision, and the crass part isn’t far to seek: the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron is still in theaters worldwide and has already grossed north of $500 million with no […]
Read MoreFor my final romance round-up in May, I slouched back to my admitted favorite sub-genre, the Regency – and not your grandmother’s Regency (your grandmother, that is, not mine – there’s no documentary evidence that my dear Granny ever read a book in her incredibly long life, bless the dear) but this new richer and […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics come in packages that are ridiculously enticing, and the foremost current example of this has to be the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Angela Carter’s 1979 short story collection The Bloody Chamber, which here gets an absolutely stunning paperback designed by Lynn Buckley and illustrated in leering, lapel-grabbing black-and-white by Alex […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have been reprinted so many times in so many formats and years and fads that no further possible textual justification can ever be found for doing it again – instead, publishers have to think outside the book, have to look for nuances of presentation if they want to create something that feels […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics mark a melancholy succession, and works in translation are particularly vulnerable to this. The old cherished translations of great works – the Rosemary Edmonds War and Peace, the E. V. Rieu Homer, the Dorothy Sayers Divine Comedy, and so on – begin to feel almost imperceptibly dated around the edges. If they’re […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are legitimate scholarly landmarks. Not as many as you might expect, and for the clear reason that the overriding purpose of any classics-reprint line is actually the opposite of originality: a new Introduction here, a pretty new cover there, but the heart of Dover, Signet, Bantam, Penguin and all other reprint lines […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics maintain a gruesome kind of relevance, which is surely part of what’s behind the publisher’s decision to bring Jean Larteguy’s 1960 French bestseller Les Centurions back into print, here ushering the book into the Classics line with the Xan Fielding translation (as The Centurions) and a Foreward by Balkan Ghosts author Robert […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics look so darn elegant in their special anniversary editions, which certainly applies to the 50th anniversary reprint of The River Between, the lean and powerful 1965 debut novel by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, here presented with a new Introduction by Beasts of No Nation author Uzodinma Iweala and sporting a gorgeous […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have perfect timing, and this neat new reprint of Elizabeth Von Arnim’s beloved 1922 bestseller The Enchanted April is a great example. If it had actually reached me in the month of April here in Boston, with the skies still black, the days still freezing, and the streets and parks still piled […]
Read MoreOur book today is actually a re-read, though you’d never guess to look at it! Just recently at a library book sale (about which more soon) I came across a paperback called Ruso and the Disappearing Dancing Girls by R. S. Downie. The author’s name sounded vaguely familiar (as familiar as it possibly could to […]
Read MoreOur books today take the standard elements of romance novels – the he, the she, the chemistry, the complications, etc. – and add in just about the last ingredient you’d think any romance novel would need: the supernatural. I realize that supernatural romance is still (and possibly forever?) all the rage, but it’s always seemed […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.