Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
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 MoreIt wouldn’t be summer without a giant killer shark novel, so Steve Donoghue goes for a fun swim with the, er, mother of them all, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.