Archive
stevereads: book reviews and commentary by Steve Donoghue
Some Penguin Classics become immediately indispensable. They so firmly supplant all previous editions of their particular work that those previous editions become curiosities, interesting in only ancillary ways. A notable recent example of this would be the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of the Heike, and now the Penguin imprint clearly has another: a […]
Read MoreThe Resurrection of the Dead We are buried below with everything we did, with our tears and our laughs. We have made storerooms of history out of it all, galleries of the past, and treasure houses, buildings and walls and endless stairs of iron and marble in the cellars of time. We will […]
Read MoreFor eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind would dimly recognize it was […]
Read MoreInk Chorus The dear old Guardian the other day published what the kids call a “listicle” – basically a themed list of items air-pumped into roughly the dimensions of an actual column – on a subject near to my heart: good books about books and reading, and I was right away reminded of a good three […]
Read MoreInk Chorus Our book today is Lawrence Clark Powell’s utterly delightful 1960 book Books in My Baggage, one of his follow-ups to his very popular earlier work of literary musings, A Passion for Books. I thought about this one lately because I’ve been low-grade fuming for a while now about the purblind convservatism of that […]
Read MoreNo doubt some of you spotted the item in your newsfeeds: a recent article noting that both Amazon and Publisher’s Weekly have already produced their lists of the Best Books of 2014, despite the fact that the year still has two months to go. This is of course both canny and craven; on the one […]
Read MoreOur story today is a corker from 1968: “If Asgard Falls …” from Thor Annual #2, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby (with customarily perfect inks by Vince Colletta), the kind of fine hammy high fantasy that always best suits this strangest of all the original crop of Marvel superheroes Lee & […]
Read MoreOn 8 November we honor the birthday of Bram Stoker, the author of the immortal 1897 novel Dracula, which brought Dracula and humanity-stalking vampires to the popular imagination and lodged them there so firmly that “Dracula” and “vampire” have become easy synonyms. Dracula has of course been packaged and re-packaged a million times, adapted for […]
Read MoreThere’s a certain kind of purity-of-the-turf book-article that I expect to encounter on a regular basis in the Penny Press, and yet even though I expect it, the encounters are always a bit depressing. The theme never changes: I’m an old-fashioned reader; I’ll never cozy up to these new-fangled electronic books or electronic reading gizmos, […]
Read MoreOne of the little joys of book-reviewing is finding “echoes” of your own reviews in somebody else’s Table of Contents. My beloved Open Letters Monthly, though well-respected in the industry, is virtually unknown outside it (except perhaps for those curious browsers who find one of our blurbs on some new paperback), so it’s extra-pleasing for […]
Read MoreOur book today is David McCord’s charming 1948 volume About Boston, a warmly affectionate look at Boston written by a Harvard graduate and long-time professional Harvard booster (and fundraiser! Good Grief, the man could get a donation-check out of a potted geranium) McCord, who was most famous in his own day as a charming poet, […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are welcome back in new reprints as often as opportunity allows; indeed, the persistence of their reappearances gives us one of the signature comforts of a canon. These works keep getting reprinted, we’re reassured, because some works deserve to be reprinted regularly. We can certainly think of the new Penguin Classics edition […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are amazing original productions, which is an odd thing to say about the world’s best line of reprints. A perfect example – and a timely one, considering the Halloween/Samhain double-whammy that strikes most of the West today – is the new Penguin Book of Witches, a fantastic original anthology of key original […]
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