Our books today are testaments to hope: Edwin Way Teale’s 1951 North with the Spring and his 1960 Journey into Summer. In both books, Teale and his wife Nellie make an unorthodox and brilliant decision: rather than stay home and experience all the nuances of the seasons on their own immediate area, they follow the […]

Our book today is a lean, moody debut mystery novel, Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman, and it’s the latest in an ominously popular new sub-sub-genre, “rural noir”: dark and sordid murder-and-violence plot lines taking place not in far-flung exotic locales but rather just forty miles off the interstate, in the most depressed […]

Our book today is The Green Dragoon, a 1957 book by Robert Bass, and it illustrates a very good impromptu rule of book-buying: never pass up a book with a title like The Green Dragoon. This particular Green Dragoon is about Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who commanded the so-called British Legion during the American Revolution […]

Our book today is Thomas Mallon’s 2009 love-letter to letters, Yours Ever, and it was brought to my mind by the sudden realization that I myself am now finished with postal correspondence. A good friend of mine, a little old lady who reviews the same novel every week for the Silver Spring Scold, has moved […]

Our book today is a pretty little thing from the Penguin “Great Ideas” series, Days of Reading by Marcel Proust, here translated and abridged and pasted together by John Sturrock back in 1988. These “Great Ideas” volumes wonderfully relished in the narrow focus: a few essays, a few excerpts along key themes, and they were […]

Our book today is a charmer from the coffee tables of yesteryear: it’s Rome for Ourselves by Aubrey Menen, a delightful, highly personal 1960 look at the history of the Eternal City, written by one of its most remarkable citizens at the time. Menen was born in London in 1912, the son of an Indian […]

Our books today are the proceeds from my latest Book Outlet haul, done in my ongoing pining hopes of someday being cool enough to be on BookTube, where such hauls are a standard part of the landscape! Even this early in my association with the site, my shopping has developed certain rules: first, the price […]

Our book today is the 2007 Supergirl volume of DC Comics’ “Showcase Presents,” which was brought to my mind by the recent announcement of a live-action WB TV “Supergirl” series coming up soon, starring a pleasant-faced young woman named Melissa Benoist (and also starring, in a bit of a casting coup, Dean Cain, who played […]

Our book today is another skimpy little thing, a 1973 Capra chapbook combining two essays by the crime fiction writer who worked under the pen name of Ross MacDonald, and although it fits in with our deep-breath respite from enormous whopping volumes, it’s also undeniable in this case that we probably don’t want this particular […]

Our book today is a bit of an antidote to the massive doorstops we’ve been dealing with recently here on Stevereads: it’s The Fur Hat, a 120-page 1989 novella by caustic and sometimes brilliant Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich, here translated into English by Susan Brownsberger. The book is a treat of hangdog sarcasm. It tells […]

Our book today is another whopper from the days of the old manilla-covered Modern Library era: The Complete Poems of Keats & Shelley, for those times when you want pages and pages of these near-exact contemporaries all running together, rather than hunting up your Oxford completes or your Penguin selects. Although the heft of this […]

Our book today is a biggie, a doorstop: it’s the combined volume Modern Library did of William Hickling Prescott‘s The History of the Conquest of Mexico and his The History of the Conquest of Peru. Prescott finished the first in 1843 and the second in 1847, and neither is exactly skimpy in terms of heft […]

Our book today is a truly perennial classic, Bulfinch’s Mythology, a book that’s been consistently in print since it first appeared – and one of those curious items whose own author wouldn’t have recognized it. It’s a one-volume collection of three books by Thomas Bulfinch: The Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858), […]

Our book today is Viper, the latest Giovanni de Maurizio murder mystery from Europa Editions. It’s the sixth installment in the series starring sad, intense young Commissario Ricciardi of the 1930s Naples police force. The sub-title of this one is “No Resurrection for Commissario Ricciardi,” and fans of the series – among which in Boston […]

The sun was shining yesterday in Boston, which was so strange after the last 90 days that I looked at the city, seeing it with the fresh realization that Boston has managed to survive a genuine battering of storms and cold and storms and cold. It wasn’t an easy survival, of course, and it was […]

Our book today is a truly beautiful thing from 2014, The David Foster Wallace Reader, a collaboration between Little, Brown and Wallace’s literary trust that aims to create a “Greatest Hits collection of novel excerpts, short fiction, an essays that we hope will delight readers who know Wallace’s work already and show those new to […]

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 […]

Ink Chorus Our book today is one of the de facto Bibles of the Ink Chorus: Books of the Century, a 2000 update of the 1998 anthology of book reviews and author interviews from the first century of the New York Times Book Review, a great big book with a hideous cover, edited by Charles […]