Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is Falling Slowly, a 1998 novel by the late Anita Brookner. Her death caught me by surprise, and a dispirited search of my shelves turned up only this one book, which I took down and duly re-read. It’s the story of Miriam and Beatrice Sharpe, a pair of middle-aged sisters in London […]
Read MoreOur book today is an energetically delightful translated work put out by the good folks at Europa Editions: Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book by Alessandro Marzo Magno. The book was originally published in Italy (as L’alba dei libri. Quando Venezia ha fatto leggere il mondo) in 2013 and […]
Read MoreOur books today all star that most inimitable of American Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin! During one of my bookshelf-reorganizations back in 2015, I had one of those awkward realizations so common to book-people: I noticed for the first time that I had something like seven different biographies of Franklin. This was embarrassing, of course (there’s […]
Read MoreOur book today is a new Star Trek novel set in the world of the Original Series, The Latter Fire by James Swallow, a sci-fi genre-novel hack of the first water, with a wide shelf of Star Trek, Warhammer, Doctor Who, and Stargate books to his credit. I made the mistake of reading his Author’s […]
Read MoreOur book today is an essential classic: Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough (we’ve met Emily before here at Stevereads), their 1942 bestseller about the madcap European tour they took as fresh-faced Bryn Mawr graduates back in the comparatively innocent days of the 1920s. They strike a mischievously […]
Read MoreOur book today is a slim, intensely satisfying anthology assemble by legendary Cape Cod nature writer John Hay in 1996 called The Great House of Birds, drawing together some of the author’s favorite writings about birds. They were a lifelong source of fascination for Hay (“birds fly away from us,” he writes, “with an unspoken […]
Read MoreOur book today is a gem from 2010: a Marvel Premiere Edition called If Asgard Should Perish, with writing by Len Wein, artwork by John Buscema, and glorious coloring by Glynis Wein. This volume – which I somehow hadn’t known existed, and which I found just the other day in the used-book basement of the […]
Read MoreWhen I have bookish guests coming to Boston, one natural destination is the Harvard Book Store over in Cambridge, a great shop lavishly stocked with both new and used books. Since I haven’t worked in Cambridge in decades, I tend not to make my way out there in the normal course of my week – […]
Read MoreOur book today is that incredibly durable classic of Venice books, Gondola Days by the redoubtable artist, novelist, and all-around overachiever F. Hopkinson Smith, who wrote it, illustrated it, and basked in its success in 1897. He’d written quite a few books prior to this one, and he’d go one to write quite a few […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics don’t look like Penguin Classics, which is a trifle odd when you consider how instantly recognizable the Penguin brand is to book-buyers, but you certainly won’t hear me complaining when the results are as nifty as The Book of Magic, a big new anthology of supernatural literature “from Antiquity to the Enlightenment,” […]
Read MoreIn the world of Regency romances, few things are more tempting to authors than a good old-fashioned rakehell, a well-born dandy whose main pleasure in life is seducing, deflowering, and abandoning all the ladies of the fashionable ton, from wide-eyed society debutantes to thrill-seeking duchesses. The fact that these rakes are inevitably also habitues of […]
Read MoreImpossible for me to pass over Michael Dirda’s “Freelance” column from last week’s TLS, and likewise impossible for me not to respond. Dirda uses the little space this time to reflect on his long stint as an editor at the legendary Washington Post Book World, and in his typical fashion, he manages to build enormous […]
Read MoreOur book today is Library: An Unquiet History, a hymn of praise from 2003 to public libraries. It’s written by Matthew Battles, who worked at the Houghton Library (and lived in scenic Jamaica Plain!) at the time, and its touchstone throughout is Harvard’s mighty Widener Library, whose wonders he very effectively evokes: The library … […]
Read MoreOne of my newer magazine subscriptions is The Nature Conservancy, published by the deep-pocketed conservation group of the same name. The magazine is slightly oddly-sized, and it’s full of great nature photography, and the small handful of issues I’ve read regularly so far have impressed me with the breadth and sensitivity of their prose. The […]
Read MoreOur book today is Jane and the Waterloo Map by Stephanie Barron, the latest in her long-running series of murder mysteries in which Jane Austen takes time out from being a novelist to try her hand at being a crime-solving sleuth. The series started back in 1996 with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor […]
Read MoreOur book today is a brightly-colored celebration from 2008: Legion of Super-Heroes: 1050 Years of the Future, sub-titled: “Celebrating 50 Years of Everyone’s Favorite Super-Team of Tomorrow!” It reprints some of the best issues from the long run of the various incarnations of the Legion of Super-Heroes, DC Comics’ sprawling super-team of teenagers fighting interstellar […]
Read MoreOur book today is Alive in the Wild, a 1970 compilation of short pieces of nature-writing by two dozen different hands, all of it introduced by Victor Calahane, a popular and busy mid-century mammalogist and science writer who was also the author of an absolutely wonderful book called Mammals of North America, which we’ll certainly […]
Read MoreOur book today is a gorgeous “coffee table book” from 1980 with the Vendome Press: Islands and Lagoons of Venice, with text by Peter Lauritzen and stunning photography by Fulvio Roiter. The book lavishly, lovingly celebrates the vast, strange world of the other Venice, the 200 square miles of lagoon, inlets, and islands sprawling around […]
Read MoreOur book today is Never in Doubt, a collection of book book reviews from stalwart bull terrier Peter Prescott, who reviewed books for Newsweek for two decades and adored our ragged fish-wrap art form with a sharp wit, a punchy prose style, and, underneath some thick plates of armor, a true believer’s heart. He was […]
Read MoreSometimes, the only fitting answer to a Polar Vortex plunge into sub-zero temperatures is a readerly plunge into the steamy world of romance novels. Curled up in bed, listening to the freezing sleet hit the window, I decided to indulge myself in a trio of sumptuous historical romances: Heir to the Duke by Jane Ashford […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.