Book Review: John the Pupil
/Three impressionable young 13th-century Franciscans embark on an improbably odyssey to bring a momentous manuscript to the Pope
Read MoreBook Review: The Violent Century
/In a world very much like our own, super-powered clandestine operatives vie with each other on missions to save or destroy humanity
Read MoreBook Review: Rust
/Every day, all around us, everything solid is inexorably corroding into powder. A game new book takes readers inside the surprisingly fascinating world of rust
Read MoreThe David Foster Wallace Reader
/Our book today is a truly beautiful thing from 2014, The David Foster Wallace Reader, a collaboration between Little, Brown and Wallace’s literary trust that aims to create a “Greatest Hits collection of novel excerpts, short fiction, an essays that we hope will delight readers who know Wallace’s work already and show those new to […]
Read MoreBook Review: A Great and Terrible King
/He established Parliament, hammered the Scots, expelled the Jews, and inspired centuries of biographers - England's King Edward I gets a lively new biography
Read MoreThe First Stevereads Book Outlet BOX-HAUL!
/A little while ago, having been trapped indoors by ten-foot snow drifts for a week or two or three, I decided to spend my $5 coupon and go shopping at Book Outlet again, just the way all my favorite enthusiastic young BookTubers do! I browsed for a few days (it’s oddly time-consuming, clicking back through […]
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Life of the Buddha!
/Some Penguin Classics open up windows on alien worlds, and they do so every bit as effectively as the very best sci-fi and fantasy, but through radically different means: by showing us what was, not what wasn’t. A perfect demonstration of this would be the slim and elegant new Penguin Classic edition of Tenzin Chogyel’s […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Fall of the Ottomans
/The Ottoman Empire joined the fighting of the First World War deeply misunderstood by both sides; a charismatic new book seeks to clarify the story of that odd meeting of East and West
Read MoreInk Chorus: Books of the Century!
/Ink Chorus Our book today is one of the de facto Bibles of the Ink Chorus: Books of the Century, a 2000 update of the 1998 anthology of book reviews and author interviews from the first century of the New York Times Book Review, a great big book with a hideous cover, edited by Charles […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Next Species
/Species arrive, thrive, and then go extinct - but after the long and frightful reign of Homo sapiens ... what?
Read MoreBook Review: Lady of the Eternal City
/Sabina, the wife of the enigmatic Roman emperor Hadrian, is beset by enemies in Rome - and safeguards a secret they'd all kill to know ...
Read MoreMystery Monday: Lamentation!
/Our book today is Lamentation by C. J. Sansom, the latest of his books to feature the sleuthing adventures of his hunchback Tudor-era lawyer Matthew Shardlake, following Heartstone way back in 2010. This series began with the quietly wonderful 2003 novel Dissolution, and all the strengths so abundantly on display in that first book have […]
Read MoreBook Review: Barbarian Spring
/A businessman is on a trip to new-money Tunisia when the world's economy goes into meltdown...
Read MoreA Stevereads Alphabet!
/Thanks to the technical wizardry of Open Letters Monthly‘s newest editor, Robert Minto, March debuts a spiffy new look for Stevereads, its first top-to-bottom re-design in almost ten years! To mark the occasion, I thought I’d present a Stevereads alphabet to help orient the hordes of new readers Robert has unconditionally guaranteed me will be […]
Read MoreBlame the Dog
/When Homo sapiens appeared in Europe 45,000 years ago, most of the long-established species there - including the Neanderthals - began to disappear. Did Homo sapiens wipe them out? And if so, did they have help from somebody right there in your living room?
Read MoreBook Review: The Girl on the Train
/In this New York Times bestseller, a hapless woman spots a mysterious event from the window of her commuter train and is soon caught up in a police investigation.
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