A Stevereads Alphabet!

Thanks to the technical wizardry of Open Letters Monthly‘s newest editor, Robert Minto, March debuts a spiffy new look for Stevereads, its first top-to-bottom re-design in almost ten years! To mark the occasion, I thought I’d present a Stevereads alphabet to help orient the hordes of new readers Robert has unconditionally guaranteed me will be helplessly drawn to his vibrant handiwork. Here, then, is one possible shorthand to a great deal of what goes on here at Stevereads:

A is for the Athenaeum – the stately old pile where I’ve spent a significant chunk of my reading and writing life, and where this Alphabet itself is being written!

B is for Boston – my home town, the greatest city on Earth

C is for comics – my permanent sweet-tooth, the 75-year story of the adventures of four-color superheroes over at Marvel and DC … a frequent object of study here at Stevereads

D is for dogs – my sleeping, farting muses, the center of my world.

E is for e-books – It’s astonishing for me to realize that this near-miraculous phenomenon, these electronic book-files that can be downloaded day or night, infinitely annotated, instantly searched, and carried in their hundreds on a stylish sheet of metal no heavier than a paperback, sprang into existence during the brief time since Stevereads started. I occasionally still run across alleged ‘purists’ who claim to avoid e-books on principle, and those alleged purists always seem surprised I’m not one of them. But I was won over the first time an e-book saved me from line-waiting tedium or allowed me to make a deadline or satisfied a specific late-night craving when I was buried in sleeping dogs and would otherwise have had to settle for boring old George Eliot. These things are a technological miracle, plain and simple.

F is for fraud! – The literary world where I make my home is chock-full of such frauds, and take each and every one of them personally, and I’m not exactly shy about that fact.

G is for Gerald of Wales – Of course this whole alphabet could easily just be a list of author names, but I choose Gerald of Wales for a few reasons: a) his obscurity has become a quick shorthand way of needling me for the overall obscurity of some of my reading tastes, b) he wasn’t always obscure! He was the best (and best-selling) author of his century and so illustrates perfectly how unfair obscurity can be, and c) he’s really good! Genuinely enjoyable, as I’ve had occasion to point out from time to time! Pointing out such sometimes-overlooked gems is a big part of what I do here at Stevereads

H is for hauls – book-hauls, that is, with which I indulge myself on a nearly-daily basis. Books come to the house in a steady stream from publishers and self-published authors (the latter due to another ‘h’ entrant, the Historical Novel Review, for which I have the honor to be the US/worldwide “Indie” editor); they come to the Post Office Box in a steady stream handled so expertly by my prized crew there; and they present themselves to me on the shelves of Boston’s many used-book venues (about which more later). In other words, I take in a great many books in any given week, and the mere sight each individual book-haul still thrills me.

I is for the Internet – Another incredible technological miracle, without which Stevereads wouldn’t be possible. The Internet has supplanted all its clunky predecessors in my life: no more DVDs, no more VCR, no more bookcase devoted to quick-reference tomes, no more TV, no more waiting for snail-mail letters from friends, etc. It’s a blessing.

J is for Jamaica Plain – Once upon a time, I would have described my specific neighborhood as a leafy little enclave, but that was before the Snow-Apocalypse of February 2015, which has buried all of Boston, including JP, under ten feet of snow and then blanketed it all in sub-zero temperatures preventing the snow-mountains from melting. Nobody now remembers what the old Jamaica Plain used to be like, but there are pictures.

K is for kids’ books – which have brought me many hours of simple pleasure, something I say unhesitatingly even though such a gruesomely large number of copulating, bill-paying adults I know have allowed their reading habits to degenerate to the point where they read nothing else but books written for children.

L is for long books – for which I have a very marked preference!

M is for magazines – I subscribe to a large roll-call of magazines – The New Yorker, Men’s Journal, Outside, Yankee, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation, The National Review, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, Isaac Asimov’s, the mighty TLS, Publisher’s Weekly, Bookforum, Audubon, Smithsonian, and The Saturday Evening Post (and read an even larger roll-call on a fairly regular basis, everything from Natural History to Reader’s Digest), and my account of their contents – In the Penny Press – has been a staple of Stevereads from the start!

N is for notebooks – not the electronic kind, but a solid paper-and-binding notebook, some variation of which I try to have with me at all times, for writing and jotting purposes.

O is for Open Letters Monthly – Naturally! Open Letters Monthly is the literary journal in whose depths you are currently reading this post of Stevereads! Along with John Cotter (author of the novel Under the Small Lights) and Sam Sacks (fiction critic for The Wall Street Journal), I helped to found Open Letters back in 2007, and it quickly expanded to take on many more editors and to provide us all with a creative home where we could come together and do some fun work (and on the rare occasions when we all gather in one place, the sheer amount of bookishness sends off ripples in the space-time continuum)!

P is for Penguin Classics – my favorite publisher (no offense to all my other friends in the publishing world) and the basis for my favorite regular feature here at Stevereads, Penguins on Parade!

Q is for quarrels! – I’m fond of them – and I play to win.

R is for re-reading – This admittedly odd behavior is a bookish favorite of mine, accounting for a good solid percentage of my annual reading-time

S is for Stevereads – The very thing you’re reading! I began it back in August of 2006 and eventually migrated it here to Open Letters once Open Letters was up and running. Here I write about what I’m reading and re-reading, whether it be a Penguin Classic I’ve read six times already or an annoying article in the Penny Press from just this afternoon. I review new books for a living (and for a great deal of fun as well), but here at Stevereads, I present the autobiography of my reading, the personal side of the ongoing process of discovery I find in books. And it’s been an enormous pleasure, writing for all you readers week after week for all these years. I plan to keep at it!

T is for the Throne of Pillows – a semi-mythical sacred location that few have actually seen! A small couch liberally layered and piled with comfy pillows, bookended by sleeping dogs, perfectly positioned for both sunlight and a nearby bookcase, an ideal spot for reading and writing! Every reader and writer should take care to have a Throne of Pillows.

U is for used bookstores – Boston was once a bristling haven of these; decades ago, there were over 30, and I had dear old friends (and fluctuating credit) at all of them. And even today, in what the news magazines refer to as a “post-literate” age, Boston is still home to a healthy-enough assortment of places to find interesting books at second-hand prices. And as long-time readers of Stevereads will already know, the king and queen and reigning empress of these is the Brattle Bookshop, one of my homes away from home (where generous gift certificates can always be phoned in for me, ahem-hem). I’ve been going to the Brattle every week for considerably longer than most of the wonderful young people who work there have been alive, and I unfailingly bring all bookish out-of-town guests there, and in between Boston’s endless round of monster snowstorms, I go there regularly still. If you’re in Boston, come and find me there, and I’ll buy you a book.

V is for vindication – This is closely connected to both F and Q, needless to say!

W is for writing – I do what could be called an enormous amount of writing every day, between reviewing and emailing and editing (and of course NaNoWriMo every November, which I wouldn’t miss for all the mud in Egypt) – and of course right here at Stevereads. I very much enjoy writing; unlike virtually everybody I know, I require absolutely no rah-rah inducement to get me to do it.

X is for the x-factor that haunts all reading complacency – and it’s more important to me than might be apparent from my sexy, self-assured outward demeanor! I have a tendency to form strong opinions about what I read, but I detest people for whom the forming of strong opinions is the end of the process rather than the beginning (I mainly detest them because they’re boring, which is something I try never to be). I regularly re-visit authors and schools of writing I’ve dismissed in the past (I sometimes document those revisitations here on Stevereads) and I’m often very glad I did. I draw a sharp line between ‘opinionated’ and ‘close-minded,’ and I hope always to be on the right side of that line.

Y is for YouTube – specifically, for BookTube, the fruity YA-obsessed sub-basement of YouTube where all the book-geeks hang out. I discovered BookTube around a year ago, and now it makes up the bulk of my YouTube viewing. The most ‘successful’ BookTubers are noxious, utterly insincere, slick professionals who get in, do their best spastic Hank Green impersonations, collect their ad revenue, and get out … but the vast majority of BookTubers are genuinely – even hopelessly – obsessed with books and reading, and the online community they’ve created is an authentically welcoming place. Hell, if I weren’t bulbous-nosed and buck-toothed and smallpox-scarred, I’d probably start a BookTube channel myself!

Z is for zest – i.e. exuberance, which I hope you’ll always find here at Stevereads. Books and reading certainly make me feel all young and zesty, and I aim to convey that here!