April Gonzales
5 libros leídos para LibriVox
- You get a painfully human tragedy out of Phaedra’s attempt to live honorably while desire and divine spite close in around her. Hippolytus is austere, self-righteous, and oddly moving, and the play’s argument between Aphrodite and Artemis leaves you thinking about purity, shame, and who gets punished for wanting.
- Yes, it's huge, and Hugo will stop everything for fifty pages on the Paris sewers, but Jean Valjean lifting that cart, or the bishop handing over his candlesticks, will sit in your chest for years. Skim the digressions if you must; the mercy at the center holds.
- You'll spend most of it wanting to shake Orgon, who's so besotted with his pious houseguest that he ignores everyone, including his sharp-tongued maid Dorine, who steals every scene she's in. It's fast, mean, very funny, and reads in an evening.
- You get a bizarre, feverish last-man-on-earth story in Adam Jeffson, whose Arctic expedition leaves him wandering through emptied cities, burning with awe, disgust, and loneliness. Shiel’s ornate prose can feel excessive, but if you enjoy decadent strangeness, the book’s solitude gets under your skin.
- You’re glad you read it for the strange intimacy of spending a day inside Leopold Bloom’s mind, where errands, advertisements, hunger, and memory keep turning unexpectedly funny and tender. It’s demanding and occasionally maddening, but the jokes, wordplay, and Molly Bloom’s closing monologue reward patience.