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stevereads: book reviews and commentary by Steve Donoghue
It’s beginning to be that time of year in the Penny Press, the infamous season of year-end book-lists. And since I’m the proud proprietor of the most authoritative of those lists (if I do say so myself)(and I do), I’m always irresistibly drawn to them wherever I find them – even if it’s in the [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a masterpiece so ubiquitous it’s often completely overlooked: The Norton Anthology of English Literature–although as soon as I say that, I have to qualify it. Not qualify the ‘masterpiece’ part, of course (if I could be wrong about that part, I’d shutter Stevereads and start a beauty-tutorial channel on YouTube), but [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are, I bitterly concede, necessary compromises. Surely one such is the 1989 Selected Poems volume of Robert Browning, edited by Daniel Karlin, who rather optimistically writes in his Introduction that he “tried to strike a balance between the poems for which Browning is best known (but which are not always his best) [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics look at first glance like a dream come true. Take the immense 1996 translation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo by Robin Buss: if you set it down next to, for example, the most popular paperback reprint of the book from twenty years ago, they hardly even look related: the [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics try, with adorable flat-footedness, to jump on the zeitgeist bandwagon in order to reach those ever-elusive unconverted readers. It’s an inherently silly thing for Penguin Classics to do, since theirs are the books that created the zeitgeist in the first place; in a perfect world, our reading culture would be attentively watching [...]
Read MoreDC Comics’ “New 52” company-wide reboot hit some of their flagship characters harder than others. The venerable WWII-era Justice Society was retconned right out of existence; warm-hearted primary-color Superman became a brooding, disaffected Dr. Manhattan-in-a-cape; Captain Marvel lost his mind – when teenager Billy Batson says his magic word nowadays, all he gets is a [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, a bristling, muscular, mazy haphazard cathedral of opinion erected by Clive James, that grinning ombudsman of the Republic of Letters. Cultural Amnesia takes its readers through an alphabet of ideas, and a look at the Table of Contents gives a great picture [...]
Read MoreOur book today is one of those gems that turn up regularly on the outdoor bargain-carts at my beloved Brattle Bookshop: it’s an old Dover paperback from 1971 called The Best of Gluyas Williams, with only a totally perfunctory Foreward by Charles Dana Gibson and a totally perfunctory Preface by Robert Benchley separating the reader [...]
Read MoreA satisfyingly literary core of The New Yorker this week, which is always pleasing and this time helped to compensate for certain lacks of satisfaction found elsewhere in the 11 November issue. It was great fun, for instance, to read Dan Chiasson’s nice long look at the poet Marianne Moore and to read his generally [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a little pamphlet-sized thing newly published by DC Comics and triple-titled Superman Man of Steel Believe, collecting ten quick backup stories taken from various Superman comics titles over the last fifteen years. The cover features a little logo reminding readers that the character of Superman is celebrating the 75th anniversary of [...]
Read MoreOne of the signature ironies of modern-day print book reviewing is on full display in the November 21st New York Review of Books, and since this particular irony irritates me, I was on edge all during my krocan peceny na slanine lunch. The irony in question here will be familiar to every owner of a [...]
Read MoreOur book today is the late Stephen Jay Gould’s 1995 essay collection Dinosaur in a Haystack, but no matter which of Gould’s dozen essay collections I revisit, the little pang of that “late” is always the same: even after more than a decade, there is no settlement with this man’s death – the present-day intellectual [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Allen Mandelbaum’s 1971 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, with thirteen drawings by Barry Moser, a fine, collection-worthy volume that I have as a sturdy deep-green paperback from the University of California Press and that I’ve read probably two dozen times – a reflection, probably, of the oddly questing nature of my relationship [...]
Read MoreWhen you read as many magazines as I do, you quickly learn to tell the players without a scorecard. There are always newcomers on the scene, but there’s also a fairly small cadre of old-hand regulars who turn up wherever the money (and the readership) is good. These old hands can be relied upon to [...]
Read MoreTo hear Bennett Cerf tell the story (or to read his well-shaped and non-actionable ‘reminiscence’ of it in his 1977 book At Random), the Modern Library in its current incarnation was born of equal parts financial desperation and marital infidelity – both being experienced in acute amounts in 1925 by publishing schmoozer and would-be Broadway [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Steve Alten’s 1997 classic Meg, and it’s a salient reminder that some modern-day classics sneak up on us, unfolding their brilliance only gradually, like a delicate lotus blossom. Those of us who’ve been fans of giant-killer-shark novels from the beginning (that beginning being, of course, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the [...]
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