Sunday Best: 80 Great Books from a Lifetime of Reviews
By John Carey
Yale University Press 2022

There’s an obvious Worm Ouroboros aspect to a book reviewer reviewing a book composed of selections from a book reviewer’s book reviews, but sometimes it must be risked. Under increasingly rare circumstances, a very good book critic will not only find a great venue (large readership, wide access to the publishing industry, etc.) but also a great editor, one who allows them both discretion and freedom.  Add to this the income from an (obviously) better-paid main job and you have the ideal arrangement for a critic.

The advantage of such an arrangement is clear: freedom engenders honesty, and the more honest a book review is, the more useful it is to its only real audience: readers looking for guidance about what (or what not) to read. There are dangers too, of course. Too much freedom can make a doyenne, and not even tyros are more prone to cant and drivel than doyennes. Tyros can learn deliberation; doyennes are lost to learning, since they no longer care about reading. So readers need to step warily whenever they encounter a collection of book reviews between hard covers. 

Fortunately, John Carey has benefitted from that ideal arrangement for a long time, and his new book, Sunday Best: 80 Great Books from a Lifetime of Reviews is the new and gloriously bookish product of all those years. Carey, an Oxford professor, was the main book reviewer for the Sunday Times for over 40 years, with his pick of books and assignments and, presumably, no editorial reins. 

These gleanings from that long run are wonderfully chosen for reach and diversity. The only thing missing, thankfully, is the usually-requisite palaverings about flyweight contemporary fiction (the closest the volume comes are a couple of reflections on new editions of classics like The Good Soldier Svejk or the Sherlock Holmes canon). 

Instead, it’s a pleasure to watch his curiosity ranging far and wide over fields of science, anthropology, biography, and cultural issues. And although the pieces breathe a greater calm and perspective than most of the ones included in his 1987 collection Original Copy, they brim with the same evergreen readerly enthusiasm, as in this opening to a collection of Dickens letters:

For readers of Dickens’s letters the hardest thing is to imagine him asleep. What was he like when it all switched off – the gigantic good humour, the high spirits, the ferocious bouts of novel-writing, the cold baths, the ten-mile walks, the peacock waistcoats, the blaze of footlights, the glittering public dinners for this or that charity, with the Inimitable reducing throngs to tears by the force of his eloquence? Could he lie quiet afterwards? Or did he roar and twitch and boil even in his dreams?

There’s also a good deal of eloquence, always a refreshing thing to encounter in the despised medium of the newspaper book review. In his review of John Harris’s 1998 book about poking around in abandoned English country houses, No Voice from the Hall: Early Memories of a Country House Snooper, Carey pauses to describe a typical scene:

The interiors of the houses were dreamscapes of ruin. Tapestries hung in rags. Veneers curled up from tabletops like broken springs. Rubbish heaps of leatherbound volumes had avalanched from the walls of libraries. In one, a colony of wasps had built a huge nest from the pages. Ancestral portraits stared through films of mildew at the havoc. Sometimes the upper floors were open aviaries. Birds rose out of the bedrooms, with a tornado of flapping, at the intruder’s approach. Grotesque relics remained. A bathtub had become a makeshift sarcophagus for the dried-up corpse of an alsatian dog.

One other potential drawback to a critic working as long as Carey has is obvious: such a critic might fall into the trap of befriending authors, or, worse, liking them. The younger Carey of Original Copy might have worried about such a fate befalling his older self; he might have fretted at the anecdote that opens this collection: an older Carey is in attendance on the dying writer Clive James and cringes as James works his way around to bringing up a sharp assessment Carey had once made of his book The Metropolitan Critic. “Later,” Carey writes, “his widow told me that he could have quoted the offending review word for word.” 

Carey uses the anecdote to warn other potential critics about making enemies by condemning books, but it’s bad advice and a misleading anecdote. The simple truth is that Carey’s review of The Metropolitan Critic was perfectly just; the only way it was “offending” is that the book’s author didn’t like it. Which counts for nothing at all. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.