Book Review: Storm and Steel
/A former slave in a brutal empire is now wielding both political and magical power the second volume in Jon Sprunk's hugely enjoyable "Book of the Black Earth" series
Read MoreCordwainer Smith in the Summertime!
/The beginning of summer’s long-delayed genuine warmth is a strong mnemonic trigger, effortlessly peeling back years and bringing treasured old reading experiences back to the forefront of memory. For me, many moons ago, summer was always a time for science fiction and fantasy – no idea why, since I read ample amounts of it in […]
Read MoreBook Review: Death and Mr. Pickwick
/An ambitious debut novel explores the world that gave birth to the meteoric career of Charles Dickens and his lesser-known competitors
Read MoreBook Review: Nixon's Nuclear Specter
/At the height of the Vietnam War, President Nixon engaged in an incredibly risky game of nuclear brinksmanship - a richly-researched new book tells the story
Read MoreBook Review: Yanks in the RAF
/While America was still technically neutral in Great Britain's fight against Germany, a handful of American flyers traveled to England and volunteered to fly in the RAF - a fascinating new book tells their story
Read MoreSix Compact Lives!
/2015 has been blessedly full of whoppingly huge new biographies, and I’ve read as many of them as I could (and I’ve got my lustful eye on the remainder, hoping to devour them before the year ends). I unabashedly love whoppingly huge biographies, but they have one drawback: their printed versions take up a hell […]
Read MoreBook Review: Multitudinous Heart
/A sumptuous new bilingual edition of the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Read MoreBook Review: The Islanders
/A woman dies in Versailles, and her death sets in motion a tangled plot connecting a small group of people in this 2010 novel by Pascal Garnier
Read MoreBook Review: Bright Eyed
/A new memoir about sleeplessness - and the wired culture that seems to encourage it
Read MoreIn Paperback: Wildlife in the Anthropocene
/Now in paperback: a new rumination on the nature of the post-wildlife world mankind has built
Read MoreBook Review: The Rise of Thomas Cromwell
/Hilary Mantel's two famous novels have fueled the centuries-old curiosity about King Henry VIII's notorious minister Thomas Cromwell: was he a saint, Satan, or a civil servant? A magnificent new study attempts to sift fact from fiction
Read MoreThe Also-Rans in the Penny Press!
/I don’t often give my second-tier periodical reading the attention it deserves here on Stevereads, which is a little unfair considering how much reading enjoyment it so regularly gives me. It’s true that my main fare comes from mighty banquets like the TLS or the New York Review of Books or Harper’s or the Atlantic […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Wolf Border
/The effort of an eccentric earl to re-introduce wolves to England draws a zoologist back to the home she left years before
Read MoreBook Review: The Unfortunates
/The steely matriarch of a wealthy family is losing both her health and her control over her family in this sharp debut novel by Sophie McManus
Read MoreThe Birds of Britain!
/Our book today is the lovely 1947 volume The Birds of Britain, written by zoologist James Fisher as part of the wonderful “Britain in Pictures” series from Collins that was once so popular and that now stands in bad needs of a series-wide reprint. That day will never come, I suspect, but The Birds of […]
Read MoreIn Paperback: The Literary Churchill
/Now in paperback, a groundbreaking study of Winston Churchill's life as a bestselling author, speechwriter, and speech performer
Read MoreOur Capital on the Potomac!
/Our book today brings back sweet, sweet memories. It’s Our Capital on the Potomac, a wonderful 1924 history of Washington, D.C by Helen Nicolay, who was an energetic researcher and something of Beltway aristocrat, being the daughter of President Lincoln’s beloved secretary John Nicolay. She was a wonderful hostess, an inevitable fixture in the town’s […]
Read MoreBook Review: Watch the Lady
/Penelope Devereux inspired a poet and may well have inspired a failed coup in Elizabethan England - and now she inspires a richly-detailed novel
Read MoreComics – Convergence Conclusions!
/This last week turned out to be a sharply sad one for me, in the realm of comics. I was reading a spattering of the latest “Convergence” spin-off issues from DC, all of them set in the various fractured sideline-realities and featuring DC characters from various titles and imprints over the decades before the company’s […]
Read MoreBook Review: Shakespeare and the Countess
/The 1596 battle over Blackfriars Theatre was waged by a strong-willed Puritan woman who had a habit of picking fights, including with the Queen; a terrific new book tells the story at length for the first time
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