Archive
stevereads: book reviews and commentary by Steve Donoghue
Some Penguin Classics just automatically prompt a smile – because some classics are just happy occurrences, free of somber overtones, free of the burden of interpretation, free of the obligation to be anything other than entertaining (which hasn’t stopped academics and English departments from beavering away at them, but even so). And one of those [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are just a bit more famous than others, and the top spot there will likely always go to E. V. Rieu’s 1946 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, because it got the whole show started. And it started in the way all the best intellectual endeavors do: on amateur footing, without a thought of [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics make their courtroom cases with the blunt force of a bulldog trial lawyer, flatly asserting that their client deserves a better deal. Of course this is what all reprint editions should do, ideally: no book should assume a second life in print – books cost money to make and time to read, after [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics live forever in the shadow of their more famous brethren, which is of course unfair. My lit’rary friends and I have often lamented the way so many authors are best known for their second-best work, and predicting when and how it’ll happen seems to boil down to divining the urgencies [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics you’ll never the hell have heard of, period. Top of that list would be something like Alexander Exquemelin’s De Americaensche Zee-Rovers, published in a lovely little edition in Holland in 1678, and yet there it is, all dolled up in a 1969 Penguin Classic translation by Alexis Brown. Exquemelin’s book translated into [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics prove a few of my Rules About Authors (not to be confused with my Rules For Authors, a very different though equally long list) rather handily, as in the case of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s rip-snorting 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast, issued as a Penguin in their American Library in [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are eerily prescient, sometimes in decidedly unpleasant ways. In 2013 we’re resolutely gearing up for the 2014 centennial of the opening of the First World War, gearing up for a probable onslaught of books, documentaries, and commemorative magazines designed to remember/reassess/cash in on one of the gruesome formative events of the [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics – in fact, perhaps a good deal more than we like to tell ourselves – enshrine books that aren’t really ‘classics’ at all, or ought not to be. This problem – if you view it as a problem, which I tend to – has been hugely exacerbated in the last twenty [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, no matter how brilliantly executed, can’t help but represent the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and surely in both those respects – brilliant execution and tantalizing lost worlds – few Penguin Classics can beat the 1977 paperback of Robert Fagles’ great 1966 translation of the Oresteia by Aeschylus. The translation is a [...]
Read MoreOur book today is the inimitably-titled little 1896 masterpiece by Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, and you only have to open it at random to any page in order to be ushered immediately into the living presence of its quirky, funny, utterly adorable author. Should ill chance ever land you in Denver, [...]
Read MoreOur book today is James Milne’s soft-spoken, charming 1925 book A London Book Window, which poses for its readers one simple, irresistible question: “Do you like to hear about the little things which go on in the book world?” Milne was a lifelong writer about books, a smart, unassuming man capable of making just about [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have been a part of the mental landscape for so long that finding a Penguin edition of them seems like a foregone conclusion, and surely high up on the list of such books would be Il Principe, the slim, explosive manual Niccolo Machiavelli wrote around 1513 as a dutiful, hopeful submission to [...]
Read MoreOur book today is The Rebel Bride, originally published in 1979 by that tireless romancer, Catherine Coulter. When it appeared back in ’79, it was one of those thin Signet Regency romances, the ones with the decorative covers and the filigreed script, this time a courteous, predictable story about Kate Brandon, a fiery-tempered and independent redhead [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Park-Street Papers, a charming 1908 volume made by Bliss Perry, the sweetest-natured man ever to run the venerable Atlantic Monthly (with all due apologies to the shade of the almost equally venerable Edward Weeks, who ran a wonderful shop for a long time but who would have readily admitted that he [...]
Read MoreDespite the tragedy that overtook the city of Boston on the 15th of April, the 18th of April can’t help but force a smile against the gloom: it’s the date of the famous ride of Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescott to warn the sleeping townsfolk of Middlesex County that the British were marching [...]
Read MoreOur book today is the tense and yet lush Tudor novel My Enemy the Queen, which that champion quiller of historical romances, Victoria Holt, wrote in a free afternoon one day in 1978. ‘Victoria Holt’ was a pseudonym for an Englishwoman named Eleanor Hibbert, who was born in 1906, endured a brief, tedious interval learning [...]
Read MoreFifty years ago the great Melville Bell Grosvenor, then the presiding quintessence of National Geographic (son of the magazine’s first editor-in-chief, and grandson of Alexander Graham Bell), collaborated with a bullpen of very creative people and dreamed up a line of National Geographic books, big, heavy, lavishly illustrated things that acted as subject- specific compendiums [...]
Read MoreOur book today is that hilarious, engrossing, inimitable classic, Twelve Against the Gods, written under the pen-name of “William Bolitho” in 1929 (the same author also wrote the enormously enjoyable Murder for Profit) and celebrating a baker’s dozen historical figures who epitomize one aspect or another of the adventurer’s ideal as conceived by our author, [...]
Read MoreAlthough I’m an unapologetic fan of the big glossy men’s-interest magazines on the market today (I subscribe to a whole slew of them, from Outside and Men’s Journal to Esquire and Details), I know better than to go to most of them for literary opinions. Not because there aren’t some very intelligent people working there, [...]
Read MoreLast week’s New Yorker started off with a letter, written by Jane Scholz, that I’ll quote in full: As is the case with the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, the tragic death of any young person is an incredibly sad event, wharever the cause. I object, however, to the effort of some of [...]
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