Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
We come at last to the final installment of the Stevereads Best – and Worst – Books of the Year for 2015 (which followed hard on the heels of the Donoghue Interregnum, to make for a very list-y December indeed!), a year in which I read more books than I’d ever done before in a […]
Read MoreAs wiser heads than mine figured out and pointed out in the public forum, 2015 was characterized by a great deal of audacity in its fiction. Most of this audacity misfired – publishing emails as a novel, straight-facedly telling your publisher that you intend to write 117 800-page novels over the next 251 years, twee […]
Read More2015 was a very bad year for adulthood. In its twelve months, the aging Baby Boomer generation and the despised Millennials faced challenges to common sense and decency on all sides – and failed every single one of those challenges. Privileged college undergraduates screamed at their college administrators in public and were not disciplined; pampered […]
Read More2015 wasn’t a very good year for fiction. It had highlights, as, thankfully, any year will have, but if you think about it, highlights are all that genuine readers ever get: all years are, in aggregate, bad for fiction (as somebody who reads more self-published books than you’d readily believe, you can trust me on […]
Read MoreA legendary editor assembles the biggest collection of Sherlock Holmes parodies, pastiches, and homages ever collected in one volume
Read MoreBiography, as many of you will know, is my favorite genre – it’s as improbable as the wildest-eyed fiction, as grounded in events as the most sober history, and often as unpredictable as any fantasy novel, and best of all, it very often brings out the best in its practitioners, many of whom are faced […]
Read MoreI read more books in 2015 than in any other year of my life (I exceeded my previous personal best – which was 2014 – in mid-December of this year and just kept going), and a great many of those books were squarely in my preferred genres of history and biography – in fact, as […]
Read MoreThe greatest pleasure associated with debut fiction, especially debut novels, is naturally the feeling of new avenues of possibility opening up; there’s something extra exciting about watching a new author try to work out a style and find a voice – perhaps only to disregard them both in their next outing, or perhaps to refine […]
Read More2015 was a very strong year for the combined Science and Nature category I love so much, a very strong year for books describing and celebrating the mind-blowing wonders of nature. This category is a bit of a sweet tooth of mine, and I’m fairly certain I read every major mainstream example of it published […]
Read MoreBy far the cheeriest of our sub-genres is this one, romance novels (I used to find murder mysteries more cheering – because you’re guaranteed to read about at least one dead human – but I’ve mellowed a bit), and yet the successful crafting a cheery escapism is no small feat of writing, which makes the […]
Read MoreOur next sub-genre is science fiction and fantasy (“sff” for the initiated), a field of fiction that’s every bit as prone to being formulaic and derivative as its sister sub-genres, although its practitioners sometimes seem oddly, almost defiantly unaware of this fact. Possibly they don’t read as much of it as I do, but in […]
Read MoreA richly-detailed new history traces one Confederate volunteer infantry through the course of the Civil War
Read MoreTime now to look at the three specific sub-genres of fiction that mean so much to me: murder mysteries, sci-fi and fantasy, and romance novels! The never-ending abundance of books in these sub-genres always makes me scratch my head a little when book-business friends of mine collectively lament periodic ‘dry spells’ in the publishing calendar. […]
Read MoreThe timidity of the English-language book-buying public has been a byword for the last fifty years, and I’m always gratified by how much it’s belied by the breadth and variety of books-in-translation every year. Still only a fraction of the whole, I grant you, but even so: all of these, the best ten translated works […]
Read MoreOnce again we turn to the Guilty Pleasures of the book world, the books that either shouldn’t exist or shouldn’t take up as much of your time as they end up doing, or even books you kind of hate yourself for liking – or all three at the same time. I gave a fair amount […]
Read MoreWe begin our 2015 Stevereads year-end festivities with a glance back at a healthy barometer of the book-world around us. That book-world is only as strong as its memory, so a very good gauge of the health of the Republic of Letters at any given time is the state of its reprints, the extent to […]
Read MoreAccording to one historian, the battle commemorated in a lost painting by Leonardo Da Vinci was the little-known birth-moment of the Renaissance
Read MoreAnd so, the Donoghue Interregnum comes to an end! In the following year, I created Stevereads and lost no time in pontificating on books new and old, with scarcely a backward glance at the unseemly gap I’d left in the published history of such pontifications. That gap is now filled, and today, with barely a […]
Read MoreWe come at last to the final year of the Donoghue Interregnum, the final year in which the reading public was fumbling blindly for guidance, taking book-recommendations from random strangers or desperate, malodorous librarians. The year is 2005, when Saddam Hussein went on trial, Islamic terrorism continued to rise all over the world, “Deep Throat” […]
Read MoreOur penultimate year is AD 2004, when a tsunami killed a quarter of a million people in Asia, terrorism struck in Spain, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, and half a dozen other places, same-sex marriage became legal in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (and neither the institution of marriage nor the world subsequently ended), and the great Renata […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.