Archive
stevereads: book reviews and commentary by Steve Donoghue
Best Books of 2017 – Nonfiction! I’ve come to expect a certain amount of variety in the books that manage the near-impossible feat of making their way from galley-and-first-reading to finished-copy-and-second-reading to critical appraisal/mauling to cold reconsideration and then ultimately to this year-end list. But even so, the best works of what I think of […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Fiction! 2017 was another outstanding year for fiction. Even the mediocre novels were sounder and smarter than in most years, and the terrific novels were correspondingly even more terrific – so much so, in fact, that many of the year’s best novels achieved that status despite committing venial and mortal […]
Read MoreWorst Books of 2017 – Nonfiction! It’s always tricky, in any given year, to guess the trends of deplorable nonfiction. Back in January, for instance, I assumed that American publishers would kick into overdrive and flood the market with insta-Trump books, but there was only a trickle: that particular tsunami is obviously coming next year […]
Read MoreWorst Books of 2017 – Fiction! 2017 was in fact an excellent year for so-called literary fiction – so excellent, in fact, that its rising tide floated all (well, most) boats: I noticed that even the year’s second- and third-rate stuff almost always had a certain level of technical soundness that you don’t always find […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Biography! I noticed three rough minor trends in American biographies in 2017, and all three were predictable in their own ways, and all three are represented on this year-end list. The first two trends were entirely understandable, since 2017 was the anniversary of both the Russian Revolutions and the kick-off […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – History! The year 2017 was of course the anniversary of two enormous historical events: Martin Luther’s sparking of what would become the Protestant Revolution and the Russian revolutions of 1917 – and a bumper-crop of books dutifully appeared on both subjects, and quite a few of those books were excellent […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Nature & Science! The sub-heading of science- and nature-writing positively filled my reading in 2017. I read a large amount of it across the whole of its spectrum, from data-heavy scientific monographs to emoji-heavy breathless popular guides, and now I encounter the same encouraging frustration I’ve encountered in making many […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Historical Fiction! Before my list departs from genre fiction for a few days, I had to call out the gems in my beloved world of historical fiction, where I found so much fantastic reading in 2017. My one disappointment in this regard just this year is the absence of self-published […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Romance! I freely admit it: I lean on the Romance genre more than I do other types of books. I use them as reading mood-changers and table-clearers; I retreat into them when I want to spend an hour with an author who’s a consummate professional intent only on telling me […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – SFF I read a lot of science fiction/fantasy in 2017 – as I do in every year, even though, as a devoted fan of square-bound SFF magazines, I increasingly find SFF novels to be basically bloated short stories, long on page-count but comparatively short on actual imaginative content. 2017’s SFF […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Mystery! As Arthur Conan Doyle discovered a century ago, the sticky part about creating a great detective or sleuthing team is that your readers are going to want their adventures to continue indefinitely, and in all but a tiny handful of instances, your readers pay the bills. So murder mystery […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Children’s & YA! I read more kid’s books and more YA in 2017 than in any previous year, and as usual, I ended up feeling greatly rewarded by that decision: I soaked up the urgency that’s the hallmark of so much YA, and I soaked up the pure delight that […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Translations! The comparative percentages of literature in translation available on the American book market are predictably embarrassing, but even so, there were enough first-rate translations to keep me busy all year, and since two of the books that eventually made it onto this list were originally composed in languages I […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Fiction Debuts! 2017 was an encouragingly prosperous year for fiction debuts. First novels in the 21st century are usually the very frailest of hot-house flowers, seeded exclusively in their authors’ family histories, given form by their authors’ personal details, and hand-raised with delicate care in the moist air and steady […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Guilty Pleasures! In any year, it’s always tricky to define what I mean by guilty pleasure. After all, in one sense there aren’t any guilty pleasures in reading and there couldn’t be: reading is the riot of the soul, and it admits no guilt. But in another sense, there’s always […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2017 – Reprints! Prior to looking at all the year’s new offerings, I like to look at all the year’s reprints, to navigate again the weird and often intensely personal vagaries that bring so many reprint volumes to market. It’s true that sometimes a publisher can simply be fulfilling a contract or […]
Read MoreThe latest in the "Last Interview" series from Melville House features the renowned iconoclast Christopher Hitchens.
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics don’t seem quite right until you actually see them in the familiar restrained format, staring out at you with that quintessential Penguin Classic quiet assurance (in this case considerably abetted by a stark cover illustration by Hsiao-Ron Cheng). Then you start to think, “Well yes, this is probably right. I’ve certainly never […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are beautiful productions in and of themselves, quite separate from the beauty (or, in the case of some authors reprinted with inexplicable regularity, the lack thereof) of the prose involved. Conspicuous along these lines is the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition line, which puts wonderful extra effort into making paperback classics worth treasuring […]
Read MoreOur book today is an awkward, adorable little children’s classic from the bygone era of 1944: Georgie by Robert Bright, an old-school hack of the first water (and Boston Transcript alum, if those two things aren’t already redundant) who wrote a kids book about a lonely ghost and watched in bemused wonder as that book […]
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